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CHARLES DICKENS
AND MARIA BEADNELL ("DORA")

THE ENTIRE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
IN AMERICA. ENGLAND. CANADA. AND THE BRITISH COLONIES; INCLUDING
ALSO BELGIUM. FRANCE. GERMANY, ITALY. SPAIN. SWITZERLAND, TUNIS,
HAYTI, LUXEMBOURG, MONACO, NORWAY, JAPAN, DENMARK, AND SWEDEN.
ANY INFRINGEMENT WILL BE VIGOROUSLY PROSECUTED.

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♦ •• • . •

A LIMITED NUMBER OF COPIES OF THIS WORK HAVE BEEN PRINTED FOR
MR. BIXBY. AS HE PARTICULARLY DESIRED THEM FOR PRESENTATION TO
FRIENDS AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS NOT MEMBERS OF THE BIBLIOPHILE
SOCIETY. MR. BIXBYS COPIES ARE PRINTED ON PAPER WATERMARKED
ESPECIALLY FOR HIM AND ARE WITHOUT THE BIBLIOPHILE TITLEPAGES
AND SEAL. THE COUNCIL

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Copyrighted, 1908, by
THE BIBLIOPHILE SOCIETY

PREFACE

The originals of the letters by Charles
Dickens printed in this volume are, with one
exception/ in the handwriting of the author.
Some of them are herein reproduced in pho-
tographic facsimile. The letters in the early
series were written to Miss Maria Beadnell,
the young lady with whom Dickens had his
first love affair, just prior to becoming of age.
Those in the later series, beginning in 18^^,
were written about twenty-two years after,
to the same person, who in the meantime had
married Mr. Henry Louis Winter, of Number
12 Artillery Place, London. At this period
Dickens had reached great prominence in the
literary world.

The members of The Bibliophile Society
are indebted to the unceasing generosity of
Mr. William K. Bixby for the rare privilege

> The exception is a letter that was returned to Dickens by Miss
Beadnell, after a lovers' quarrel, but which before returning she care-
fully copied in her own handwriting. See facsimile at p. 46.

[ix]

75372^

of possessing the first printed edition of these
excessively valuable MSS. That a collection
of such important autobiographical material
should have remained so long in obscurity is
a most singular fact. So sacredly were these
letters guarded after their discovery and pur-
chase from a daughter of Mrs. Winter in
England by one who realized their worth, that
their owner allowed only a single one of them
ever to be copied, and that only for private
reference, with all the names omitted. Find-
ing that their publication in England would
be prohibited, he personally brought them to
America, when the entire collection was pur-
chased by Mr. Bixby.

If an authentic autobiography of Dickens
were suddenly to spring into existence, it
would produce a literary sensation. If such a
work were found to contain many important
identifications of characters and personal traits
of the author which were unknown to his
most intimate friends, and new even to the
members of his own family, it would imme-
diately excite the interest of the entire literary
world. The present is, in effect, such a vol-
ume. The letters of which it consists —
which were written in the strictest confidence

[X]

and intended for no eyes but those of the one
to whom they were addressed — are earnest,
sincere, and direct from the heart. They dis-
close certain life experiences of the author
never before imparted to the world; in his
own words, " things that I have locked up in
my own breast, and that I never thought to
bring out any more." Aside from their per-
sonal bearing, they furnish a key to the char-
acters and incidents in several of the more
important novels, some of which have been
the subjects of heated discussion ever since
the death of the author. For instance, they
positively verify many disputed points in
David Copperfield, the greatest and most
personal of the novels, and show that the
love affairs of its hero were almost identical
with those of Dickens himself. They further
prove conclusively that in Little Dorrit Dickens
narrated much of his own experience. The
personal character of that work now becomes
second only to David Copperfield; and many
scenes which have seemed commonplace, when
regarded merely as fruits of the novelist's
imagination, become at once enlivened with
dramatic interest.

But for the fortunate discovery of these

[ xi ]

letters, no one would ever have imagined the
extent to which Little Dorrit is in reality a
continuation of "The Personal History Ad-
ventures, Experience and Observation " of the
hero of David Copperfield. In dealing with
the anticlimax of his old love affair Dickens
masquerades in the role of Arthur Clennam
in Little Dorrit, while the girl who had dis-
tracted his heart in boyhood (the original of
Dora in David Copperfield) was assigned the
garrulous part of the flippant Flora Pinching.
Plora's father, Mr. Casby (who in real life was
George Beadnell, the father of Maria Beadnell,
of Number 2 Lombard Street, London, and in
David Copperfield was Mr. Spenlow, the father
of Dora), comes in for his share of raillery, and
is penalized severely for the part he is supposed
to have played in separating the young lovers.
He is ** the wooden-headed old Christopher,"
of "elephantine build," — the close-fisted old
patriarch with bottle-green coat, of whom his
own daughter (Plora) is made to say, that he
" is always tiresome and putting his nose every-
where where he is not wanted." The verses
by Dickens in The Bill of Fare (never before
printed) identify the originals of a number of
characters in his works which were taken from

[xii]

real life. In a letter to Mrs. Winter, referring
to the love affairs of David Copperfield, he
says that his readers little thought what reason
he had to "know it was true, and nothing
more nor less." In another of the letters he
said : " A few years ago (just before Copper-
field) I began to write my Life, intending the
manuscript to be found among my papers
when its subject should be concluded. But as
I began to approach within sight of that part
of it [referring to his early love], I lost courage
and burned the rest."

It is a significant fact that he refers to this
circumstance as having occurred " just before
Copperfield." There can be little doubt that
on this account he changed his purpose, and
either before or after destroying the manu-
script, determined to write the story of his
life, which, mingled with supposititious inci-
dent, was put forth under the pseudonym of
David Copperfield. The object of his youthful
devotion is therein impersonated as "Dora."
He doubtless felt an irresistible impulse to
write and unburden his mind of the tragic
experiences and disappointments of his youth,
and when in the course of outlining these he
came up to the Maria Beadnell episode, he was

[ xiii 1

at a loss to know how to handle it so as to
give it the required impressiveness without
offending the members of his family, — par-
ticularly his wife. He could not treat it lightly,
for it was the all-absorbing event of his life.
The whole plan of an acknowledged autobi-
ography was therefore abandoned.

Again, he was probably not unmindful of
the pecuniary side of the matter, and took
into consideration the fact that in storing his
manuscript away until *' its subject should be
concluded," he would be burying one of his
most profitable works. It is extremely doubtful
if even after his death the Dickens family
would ever have published the MS. of David
Copperfield under any autobiographical title;
for it is observable that, even to this day, his
descendants are unwilling to admit publicly
that Dora and Flora were more than lay figures,
existing only in the author's imagination.

These letters would have been an excessively
valuable asset to any of Dickens' biographers,
and even Forster himself would have found
in them many disclosures of significant facts
which were entirely strange to him.

From a reading of the first series of the
letters written by Dickens in his boyhood days,

[xiv]

it may be inferred that the coquettish girl to
whom they were addressed resorted to artful
and surreptitious tactics in repulsing and dis-
couraging his persistent attentions after she
became tired of him, although she had pre-
viously encouraged him to lavish his " entire
devotion " upon her. Whether on account of
parental interference, or change of heart, or
perhaps both, it seems sure that she was deter-
mined to get rid of him, and doubtless wished
to do this as gracefully as possible, and without
wounding his pride too deeply. It seems quite
plausible that with this in mind she may have
designedly arranged with her friend Mary Anne
Leigh for her to display a lively and unwonted
interest in Dickens and his affairs, and then she
proceeded to reprove him for faithlessness and
fickleness, and hypocritically assumed the air of
one deeply injured. In defending himself against
this accusation, he said of Miss Leigh : —

*' You certainly totally and entirely misunder-
stand my feeling with regard to her — that
you could suppose, as you clearly do (that is
to say, if the subject is worth a thought to
you), that I have ever really thought of M. A. L.
in any other than my old way, you are mis-
taken. That she has for some reason, and to

[XV]

suit her own purposes, of late thrown herself
in my way 1 could plainly see, and I know it
was noticed by others. For instance, on the
night of the play, after we went upstairs, I
could not get rid of her. God knows that
I have no pleasure in speaking to her, or any
girl living, and never had. May I add that
you have been the sole exception."

It is clear, also, that Miss Beadnell accused
Dickens of having confided inviolable secrets
to Miss Leigh, while she herself seems to have
been the offender in this respect. In his own
defence he wrote : " I never by word or deed,
in the slightest manner, directly or by impli-
cation, made in any way a confidante of Mary
Anne Leigh. . . . Her duplicity and disgusting
falsehood, however, renders it quite unneces-
sary to conceal the part she has acted, and I
therefore have now no hesitation in saying that
she, quite unasked, volunteered the information
[to friends] that YOU had made her a confidante
of all that had eoer passed between us without
reserve. In proof of which assertion she not
only detailed facts which I undoubtedly thought
she could have heard from none but yourself,
but she also communicated many things which
certainly never occurred at all."

[xvi]

In the heat of his boyish anger he wrote a
scathing note to Miss Leigh, in which he said :
*' I can safely say that I never made a confi-
dante of any one. I am perfectly willing to
admit that if I had wished to secure a confi-
dante in whom candour, secrecy, and kind
honorable feeling were indispensable requisites,
1 could have looked to none better calculated
for this office than yourself; but still the
making you the depository of my feelings or
secrets is an honor I never presumed to expect,
and one which I certainly must beg most posi-
tively to decline. ... I would much rather
mismanage my own aflFairs than have them
ably conducted by the officious interference of
any one. I do think that your interposition
in this instance, however well intentioned, has
been productive of as much mischief as it has
been uncalled for."

In David Copperfield Dickens immortalized
the name, if not the character, of this girl who
had been such a disturbing element in his
love-making difficulties, and one can almost
see the self-satisfied smile of " sweet revenge "
playing upon his features as he wrote : —

"We had a servant, of course. She kept
house for us. I have a still latent belief that

[ xvii ]

she must have been Mrs. Crupp's daughter
in disguise, we had such an awful time with
Mary Anne. . . . She was the cause of our
first little quarrel. . . . Mary Anne's cousin
[a soldier] deserted into our coal-hole, and
was brought out, to our great amazement, by
a piquet of his companions in arms, who took
him away handcuffed in a procession that
covered our front garden with ignominy. This
nerved me to get rid of Mary Anne, who went
so mildly, on receipt of wages, that I was sur-
prised, until I found out about the tea-spoons,
and also about the little sums she had borrowed
in my name of the tradespeople without
authority."

In 18^2 Dickens was a mere youth, and
gave no immediate promise of fortune or fame.
His literary talents were undeveloped, and Miss
Beadnell, the daughter of a banker, was per-
haps not attracted by his inauspicious pros-
pects, although in the early stages of their
courtship days she seems to have been quite
fascinated by him, and to have given no
thought to such gross and material considera-
tions. She afterwards married Mr. Winter,
a merchant in good standing, who in later
years became a bankrupt, and after renewing

[ xviii ]

her correspondence with Dickens twenty-three
years later, she suflFered the humiliating act of
appeah'ng to him to use his influence in ob-
taining some employment for her husband.
The unpromising youth whose idolatrous love
she had spurned, and whose consequent
"wretchedness and misery" had been the
object of her "pity," afterwards became the
popular idol of all England and America, while
the propitious fortunes of the man of her
choice had meanwhile vanished and become
hopelessly dissipated.

In the most fanciful of all Dickens' imagi-
nations he could scarcely have conceived a
more dramatic spectacle than this, in which
he involuntarily played the leading part. Hap-
pily, however, for the world at large — and
perhaps for Dickens himself — this early love
aflfair ended as it did; for if he had married
the object of his first love, the complacency of
his mind — for the time being, at least —
would have neutralized the ambition which,
fired by the sting of defeat and adversity,
produced one of the world's greatest literary
geniuses.

In the fortunes of war the issue of a great
battle has often turned upon an incident of

[xix]

apparently trivial consequence; and it has
frequently happened that single episodes of
seeming unimportance have brought fortune
and great renown to those of whom these
achievements were least expected. The most
painful experiences often prove to be blessings
in disguise, and it would be difficult to find
a more splendid demonstration of this truth
than we have in the life of Charles Dickens.

In a letter to Mrs. Winter (nee Miss Bead-
nell) in iSSS, he wrote : " Whatever of fancy,
romance, energy, passion, aspiration and deter-
mination belong to me, I never have separated
and never shall separate from the hard-hearted
little woman — you — whom it is nothing to
say I would have died for with the greatest
alacrity. ... It is a matter of perfect certainty
to me that 1 began to fight my way out of
poverty and obscurity with one perpetual idea
of you." '

There can be no doubt that Dickens was
conscious of the fact that the stinging rebuff
administered to him was due to his lowly posi-
tion in life, and that this animated him with a

1 He embarked at once in the field of literature, and in less than
eight months after the separation the first of his Sketches made their
appearance in magazine form. See passage from his letter to Forster,
quoted on pages 5 and 6, infra.

[XX]

zeal which he had never before experienced,
and which otherwise he would never have
possessed. This came at a singularly oppor-
tune time, v/hen his mind was in its formative
stages, and the resolutions and impressions of
that period remained with him through life.

In writing to Mrs. Winter in later years he
said : *' I forget nothing of those times. They
are just as still and plain and ckar as if I had
never been in a crowd since, and had never
seen or heard my own name out of my own
house. . . . You so belong to the days when
the qualities that have done me most good
since were growing in my boyish heart that I
cannot end my answer to you lightly." His
first love letters furnish unmistakable evi-
dence of his sincerity and steadfastness of pur-
pose,— qualities which ruled supreme to the
end. There have perhaps been few men who
throughout their lives have clung more tena-
ciously to the memories and ideals of youth.

Those who have commonly ascribed a cold-
blooded and unresponsive nature to Dickens
will be surprised to learn from these letters
that there was concealed within him an abun-
dance of the tenderest sentiment, and that his
mind was highly impressible. There appears,

[ xxi ]

however, to have been but one thing capable
of completely awakening these delicate sensi-
bilities, and that was the remembrance of his
first love. In his letter of February 1^, 18^^,
in which he tenderly recalls the sad memories
of his youthful devotion, he said: "When I
find myself writing to you again, all to your self,
how can I forbear to let as much light in upon
them as will show you that they are there
still ! "

In writing of Dora, in part XV of David
Copper field (issued in July, 18^0), under
the chapter heading, "Our Housekeeping,"
Dickens said: "I look back on the time I
write of; I invoke the innocent figure that
I dearly loved, to come out from the mists and
shadows of the past and turn its gentle head
towards me once again ; and I can still declare
that this one little speech was constantly in
my memory." Is it to be wondered that the
still living Dora should be seized with an
impulse to respond to this imploring speech
by a man who had already become world-
renowned, any more than that the lost dove in
the wilderness will respond to the distant call
of its mate? Is it surprising, moreover, when
she did respond by writing to him, that there

[ xxii ]

should be "a stirring of the old fancies," as
he says? That Dickens was not overstating
his former devotion for the original of Dora
may be seen from the following passage from
David Copperfield : "If I may so express it,
I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over
head and ears in love with her, but I was
saturated through and through. Enough love
might have been wrung out of me, metaphor-
ically speaking, to drown anybody in; and
there would have remained enough within me,
and all over me, to pervade my entire exist-
ence. . . . The sun shone Dora, and the birds
sang Dora. The wind blew Dora, and the
wild flowers in the hedges were all Doras, to
a bud."

The later letters show that in order to es-
tablish a sure footing for the much desired
cordial relationship, Mrs. Winter felt herself
called upon to oif er some plausible explanation
for her actions in early years, and whatever
her excuses were, assuredly they were accepted
at their full face value. Precisely what she
wrote to Dickens we shall never know, except
by inference from his reply,^ in which he said :

1 It would appear that Mrs. Winter told Dickens how she had
pined for him after their relationship in early years was broken off;

[ xxiii ]

" If you had ever told me then what you tell
me now, I know myself well enough to be
thoroughly assured that the simple truth and
energy which were in my love would have
overcome everything. ... All this again you
have changed and set right — at once so cour-
ageously, so delicately and so gently, that you
open the way to a confidence between us
which still once more in perfect innocence and
good faith, may be between ourselves alone."
Although Dickens was married to Miss
Hogarth three years after boldly vowing to
Maria Beadnell, — " I have never loved and I
never can love any human creature breathing
but yourself," it is left to the reader to judge
whether or not these seemingly rash vows of
undying devotion had any bearing upon the
*' incompatibility of temperaments " which, un-
happily, resulted in estrangement and sepa-
ration from his wife more than twenty years

for in Little Dorrit he thus tauntingly records her explanation : "One
more remark," proceeded Flora with unslackened volubility, " I
wish to make, one more explanation I wish to offer, for five days I
had a cold in the head from crying which I passed entirely in the
back drawing-room — there is the back drawing-room still on the
first floor and still at the back of the house to confirm my words."
It is noteworthy, however, that this was written after his disenchant-
ment, which occurred subsequent to writing the letter from which
the extract is taken.

[ xxiv ]

later. The father of nine children, he wrote
Mrs. Winter in 18^^, — "Nobody can ever
know with what a sad heart I resigned you,
or after what struggles and what a conflict.
My entire devotion to you and the wasted
tenderness of those hard years which I have
ever since half-loved, half-dreaded to recall,
made so deep an impression on me that I refer
to it a habit of suppression which now belongs
to me, which I know is no part of my original
nature, but which makes me chary of showing
my aflFections, even to my children, except
when they are very young." Here is the first
self-confessed reason for a dominant charac-
teristic in Dickens. His "habit of suppres-
sion " is a matter of common knowledge, but
perhaps no one ever supposed it to be "no
part of his original nature," or that it was
acquired through disappointment in love.

Let it not be supposed, however, that the
Mrs. Winter who later came into his life was
a contributory factor in his unfortunate domes-
tic infelicity. It was in Dickens' nature to
live more in his books and idealities than in
the bosom of his family, and it is doubtful
if there was to be found one woman in a
thousand who could have made both him and

[ XXV ]

herself happy under these conditions. Later
developments prove that he was more in earnest
than might have been imagined v^hen in 183^
he v^rote Maria Beadnell, — "My feeling on
one subject was early roused; it has been
strong, and it will be lasting."

Although of a private nature, the correspond-
ence contains nothing which need shock
the most sensitive morals. The author does
not expose himself to unfavorable comment;
for the sentiments expressed are mostly ani-
mated reflections of passions and impulses of
bygone days, which he has permanently re-
corded, and given dramatic color by the eloquent
descriptive powers of a brilliant and matured
mind. There is nothing in the letters that
could militate against his reputation, or mini-
mize the reverence in which his memory is
held. The letters having been written to one
outside of the author's own family, we may be
absolved from any charge of exposing inviolable
confidences.

If while reflecting upon fondly cherished
memories of the past, Dickens unbosomed
himself in an unguarded moment, with no
thought that the world would ever be the wiser,
this atfords no reason why his admirers of

[ xxvi ]

to-day should be denied admission to his con-
fidence, and to a resultant better understand-
ing of his true character. He was to a large
extent a public servant, because he was de-
pendent upon the patronage of the public for
his popularity and support ; therefore the world
at large has perhaps a higher claim upon him
than Mrs. Winter ever had, and there can be
no logical excuse at this time for withholding
facts which will be as new and interesting to
his readers as they were precious to Mrs.
Winter. No matter how studiously we may
have pondered over the writings and biogra-
phies of Charles Dickens, after reading the
contents of this volume we shall surely know
him as we never knew him before, and feel a
greatly renewed interest in many of his writ-
ings, — particularly in David Copperfield and
Little Dorrit.

By no means the least interesting among
these letters are the ones written last in the
second series, after the author's disenchant-
ment. It is to be remembered that the letters
which are so overflowing with tender remem-
brances and gushing sentiment were all written
before the "meeting" took place. One of
the strangest features of the whole romance is

[ xxvii ]

that Dickens appears to have lived for years
in a perpetual dream, in which he could never
picture the girl he had loved in any real or
imaginative situation apart from that in which
he had known her in his boyhood. In one of
his exuberant moods he wrote to Mrs. Winter,
— " You are always the same in my remem-
brance. When you say you are ' toothless, fat,
old, and ugly' (which I don't believe), I fly
away to the house in Lombard Street, which
is pulled down, as if it were necessary that the
very bricks and mortar should go the way of
my airy castles, and see you in a sort of rasp-
berry colored dress with a little black trimming
at the top — black velvet it seems to be made
of — cut into Vandykes — an immense number
of Vandykes — with my boyish heart pinned
like a captured butterfly on every one of
them." But when the awakening finally came,
alas, he found that the " vision of his youth "
had, as a living reality, fallen far short of his
fanciful idealization. The dream of twenty
years was over, and the displeasures of the
sudden awakening were forthwith recorded
in Little Dorrit^ where the Dora of his youth

1 If the reader has a copy of Little Dorrit at hand, turn to one of
its early chapters, entitled " Patriarchal," and read it through. For

[ xxviii ]

was transformed into the Flora of his mature

years.

Note. — The foregoing Preface was written
before the manuscripts were placed in the hands
of Professor Baker, and the impressions and
deductions recorded are such as presented
themselves to the writer after a careful study
of the correspondence. It was the intention
to omit from these prefatory remarks any pas-
sages that might prove to be a repetition of
comments made by the editor, but upon com-
paring this with his work it was found that
scarcely any of the comments are paralleled,
and that conclusions disagree in but a single
instance — that in relation to the Mary Anne
Leigh episode. It will be seen that Pro-
fessor Baker contends that she herself was
in love with Dickens and that the seed of
dissension sowed by her resulted from this

Clennam, substitute Dickens; for Flora Pinching, substitute Mrs.
Winter ; and supplant Mr. Casby by Mr. George Beadnell, Maria Bead-
nell's father. How undisguisedly Dickens expresses his characteristic
melancholy in making Clennam say, as he sat musing before the
dying embers in the fireplace, — "And turned his gaze back upon
the gloomy vista by which he had come to that stage in his exist-
ence: 'So long, so bare, so blank! No childhood, no youth, ex-
cept for one remembrance; ' the one remembrance proved, only that
day, to be a piece of folly I . . . The one tender recollection of his
experience would not bear the test, and melted away."

[ xxix ]

attachment and her consequent pique over
her inability to obtain any responsiveness from
him. Although with no thought of putting
forth any theory in opposition to that of the
distinguished editor, yet the point is admittedly
an interesting one, and since intricate puzzles
are more or less absorbing, particularly when
they concern the bewildering mysteries of a
woman's heart, it may be that the reader will
enjoy the contrasting views presented.

Henry H. Harper

[ XXX ]

> 4

> » » • •

I . • • • >

' , • . • • • . •

• 1 > • 1

* ■> « J -^ .

CHARLES DICKENS
AND MARIA BEADNELL ("DORA")

Letters written by Charles Dickens in his
youth are extremely rare. Four only have been
printed. His Letters, edited by his sister-in-
law, Miss Georgina Hogarth, and his daughter
Mary, contain only three dated before 1837,
when Dickens was already twenty-five years
old. One of these, written in 18^3, is to his
future brother-in-law, Henry Austin, and two,
of 183^, are to his fiancee, Miss Catherine
Hogarth. The editors state that though their
"request for the loan of letters was so promptly
and fully responded to, that we have been pro-
vided with more than sufficient material for
our work," yet they " have been able to procure
so few early letters of any general interest that
we have put these first years together." * Under
the dates 1833-36 they print only the three
letters already mentioned, — one of these, as
given, only a fragment.

^ The Letters of Charles Dickens, i vol., 1893, pp. vii, 3.
11]

1 • •

•: • •

In Hotten's Charles Dickens, the Story of his
Life, a letter of the reportorial days of Dickens
on the Morning Chronicle (183^-36) is printed
with the comment, — " This is, in all likelihood,
the only letter of Dickens' reporting days now
in existence."^

That letters written to Dickens in this early
part of his career should be lacking is easily
explained. In September, i860, he carefully
destroyed all correspondence up to that time
received by him. Writing to Mr. Wills, his
fellow-editor of Household fVords and All the
Year Round, he said : —

" Yesterday [Sept. 3] I burnt in the field at
Gad's Hill the accumulated letters and papers
of twenty years. They sent up a smoke like
the genie when he got out of the casket on the
seashore ; and as it was an exquisite day when
I began, and rained very heavily when I fin-
ished, I suspect my correspondence of having
overcast the face of the heavens." ^

Any admirer of Dickens and his work must
echo very regretfully the words of Charles

1 It is reported that some ten years ago a series of letters from
Dickens to tlie friend of liis youtii, Henry KoUe, clianged hands in
Birmingham, England. The present editor hopes that the publica-
tion of the letters in this book may bring this set to Hght, for they
should supplement and explain the letters here given.

a The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1893, p. 501.

[2]

Dickens the younger in regard to this whole-
sale destruction of letters and papers : " Who
shall say what records invaluable to the biog-
rapher blew into ashes that September morn-
ing, in the meadows by the cedars ! " ^

In this absence of early letters to or from
Dickens, the discovery of some half-dozen
written before he had won any literary posi-
tion for himself, and antedating any heretofore
published, would be interesting enough. But
when these letters are seen to be not only
thoroughly characteristic and intimately per-
sonal, but proof of an early love aifair of great
intensity at the time and of lasting signifi-
cance for Dickens and his work, the find
becomes exciting. When chance, or the as-
siduity of a collector, adds to these early letters
another set which dramatically reveals an after-
math of this youthful romance, occurring some
twenty years later, surely the collection has
the greatest possible interest for all readers of
Dickens.

John Forster, the closest friend of the novel-
ist, and his literary executor, comparing Dickens
and David Copperfield in his Life of Charles
Dickens, wrote : " He too had his Dora at ap-

' Introduction to The Uncommercial Traveller, 1892.

[3]

parently the same hopeless elevation; striven
for as the one only thing to be attained, and
even more unattainable, for neither did he suc-
ceed nor happily did she die ; but the one idol,
like the other, supplying the motive to exertion
for the time, and otherwise opening out to the
idolater, both in fact and in fiction, a highly
unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to
laugh and tell him I had no belief in any but
the book Dora, until the incident of a sudden
reappearance of the real one in his life, nearly
six years after Copperfield was written, con-
vinced me there had been a more actual foun-
dation for those chapters of his book than I was
ready to suppose." ^

The importance of this early love aflFair the
Dickens family has either ignored or, appar-
ently, sought to minimize. In the Letters appear
one letter and part of another, both written
in 18^^, to the object of his youthful love,
then married and settled as the wife of Mr.
Henry Winter. The only reference to Mrs.
Winter in the Narrative preceding the letters
of this section of the book is — "A very dear
friend and companion of Charles Dickens in
his youth." In the Biographical Edition of

» Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, 1872, vol. i, pp. 92, 93.

[4]

the works of Dickens, his eldest son, as editor,
after urging that Mr. Forster in certain remarks
of his should have exercised "some of that
discretion which is always supposed to be left
to biographers, but which, unfortunately, they
do not always think fit to employ," says:
" There is some reference in Mr. Forster's Life
to a ' Dora,' who came across Charles Dickens'
path very early in his career — when he was
eighteen, in fact, — but as she married some-
body else, and developed afterwards into the
' Flora ' of Little Dorrit, she could have had in
reality very little to do with Dora Spenlow,
except in so far as the 'child-wife' was the
idealized recollection of the dream of a ro-
mantic young man."^ Yet Dickens himself
wrote to Forster in 18^^, when the latter
persisted in refusing to believe that Dora
reproduced at all accurately any past expe-
rience of his friend : —

"I don't quite apprehend what you mean
by my overrating the strength of the feeling of
five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean of
my own feeling, and will only think what the
desperate intensity of my nature is, and that
this began when I was Charley's age ; that it

1 David Copperfield, Introduction, p. xxi.
[5]

excluded every other idea from my mind for
four years, at a time of life when four years
are equal to four times four ; and that I went
at it with a determination to overcome all the
difficulties, which fairly lifted me up into that
newspaper life, and floated me away over a
hundred men's heads; then you are wrong,
because nothing can exaggerate that. I have
positively stood amazed at myself ever since 1 —
And so I suffered, and so worked, and so beat
and hammered away at the maddest romances
that ever got into any boy's head and stayed
there, that to see the mere cause of it all, now,
loosens my hold upon myself. Without for a
moment sincerely believing that it would have
been better if we had never got separated, I
cannot see the occasion of much emotion as
I should see anyone else. No one can imag-
ine in the most distant degree what pain the
recollection gave me in Copperfield. And,
just as I can never open that book as I open
any other book, I cannot see the face (even at
four-and-forty), or hear the voice, without
going wandering away over the ashes of all
that youth and hope in the wildest manner. "
And in one of the second set of letters
printed in this book Dickens wrote : " I fancy —

[6]

though you may not have thought in the old
time how manfully I loved you, — that you may
have seen in one of my books a faithful reflec-
tion of the passion I had for you, and may
have thought that it was something to have
been loved so well, and may have seen in
little bits of ' Dora ' touches of your old self
sometimes, and a grace here and there that
may be revived in your little girls, years hence,
for the bewilderment of some other young
lover — though he will never be as terribly
in earnest as I and David Copperfield were.
People used to say to me how pretty all that
was, and how fanciful it was, and how ele-
vated it was above the little foolish loves of
very young men and women. But they little
thought what reason I had to know it was
true and nothing more nor less. ... As I have
said, I fancy you know all about it quite as
well as I do, however. I have a strong belief —
there is no harm in adding hope to that —
that perhaps you have once or twice laid down
the book, and thought * How dearly that boy
must have loved me, and how vividly the man
remembers it I' "

Surely, after these two statements of Dick-
ens, it is idle further to contend that Dora

[7]

Spenlow is only an "idealized recollection of
the dream of a romantic young man."

How, too, can any except the most con-
ventional and the habitually censorious fmd
anything to censure in an ardent but honor-
able love affair preceding the engagement of
Dickens to Miss Hogarth by some two years
or more? How many men marry the first
woman adored by them ? What possible crit-
icism is it on the woman one marries, that one
may already have been in love with another?
In love, as in other human relations, one's
judgment may be tempered to sanity and wis-
dom by earlier experience. Romeo had his
Rosalind, and to that extent at least most
men are Romeos. And many a wifely Juliet
knows that for nothing does her spouse more
devoutly thank his Fate than that Rosalind
threw him over, thus saving him for a wiser
and truer companionship. Even if the second
choice prove not wholly happy, why must the
first, out of respect for the second, be ignored
or denied by biographers? As we shall see,
the conduct of young Dickens as mirrored in
these love letters gave him no ground for later
mortification or even regret.

Except to the most hypercritical mind, read-

[8]

ing these early letters can bring no sensation
except pleasure in their manly ardor, only sym-
pathy for the deeply moved and suffering
youth, and a better understanding of the
mood in which David Copperfield was written,
as well as of the man who wrote it.

The only valid objection against publishing
these letters years ago, when some at least of
the second set were known to the editors of
the Letters, was that it might have pained the
woman to whom both sets were written to
see them in print — not because there was any
wrong in them, but because they are intimately
personal. Now that she has been dead over
twenty years and it is the day of the grand-
children of her contemporaries, surely it is not
necessary to hold any of them back longer if
they contain important information, either cor-
rective or supplementary, for the student of
Dickens and his work. Such information the
two sets — and they cannot be given sepa-
rately — do provide.

Who was this early love of Dickens? In
1830 the manager at Smith, Payne and Smith's,
the bankers, of Number 1 Lombard Street, was
John Beadnell. He lived close by, at Number
2 Lombard Street. Sharing his quarters was

[9]

his brother, George Beadnell. After starting
life as an architect, George Beadnell had been
induced by his brother to enter the service of
the bank, in which, by I83O, he held a respon-
sible position. Later he became its manager.
This George Beadnell had three daughters,
Margaret, Anne, and Maria. In I830 Maria
Beadnell was nineteen. To this family young
Dickens was introduced by his friend Henry
Kolle, a quilt-printer of Number 14 Addle
Street, Aldermanbury. This was about a year
and a half after Dickens had once for all given
up Law by withdrawing from the office of
Ellis and Blackmore of Gray's Inn.

When Dickens was first introduced to the
Beadnells, he was either just at the close of
his seventeenth or just entering on his eight-
eenth year. His introduction to this family,
well-to-do, and fond of entertaining a large
circle of friends, also comfortably placed in
life, meant a real metamorphosis in the life of
the hypersensitive youth.

In order to appreciate rightly this metamor-
phosis we must remember what had been
happening to Dickens in the period just pre-
ceding this introduction. The years between
ten and this time had been full of miserable

[10]

unhappiness at first, later ameliorated; but
still the youth was restless and full of blind
discontent, because his life did not satisfy, or
promise to satisfy, certain vague longings, am-
bitions, dreams, — call them what you will.
It is somewhat hard for any American lad to
read with perfect sympathy the bitter out-
pourings of the mature Dickens as to his ex-
periences as a coverer of paste pots in the
"Warren's Blacking" establishment. So in-
tense was his feeling of the degradation this
work meant for him that after it was over he
never mentioned the experience to any one till a
chance remark of a friend to Forster that he had
seen Dickens as a lad working in this place in-
duced him, after a hard struggle with himself,
to disburden his mind of this nightmare.

Apparently, he had not feared moral de-
terioration, but was outraged by the sense
that as an individual he was slipping under
in the social current, — was losing, perhaps
forever, the position into which he had been
born and the possibilities of advancement of
which he had dreamed, if not definitely, at
least unceasingly. It is necessary to speak of
this earlier experience in some detail, for un-
less one thoroughly comprehends the morbid

[H]

sensitiveness of the lad, one misses the full
significance of both the early and the late
correspondence in the pages to follow. As a
youth Dickens was not only morbidly sensi-
tive, but he carried always with him a sense
that he had been defrauded of much that home
life meant to most of his contemporaries. The
shifting from place to place, the ebbing for-
tunes of his family, the easy-going tempera-
ment of his father, had all made his childhood
trying enough. Dickens must have felt that
he had been to some extent neglected by his
parents, — that he had been cheated by Fate
of his birthright. Any home of even ordinary
stability and comfort into which he could enter
freely must, therefore, have seemed to him a
real haven.

Moreover, as has been said, a sense of his
own fitness for unusual things, a vague vision
of his own latent powers, came early to the
precocious boy. This is what moved him to
tears of mortified ambition when his sister
Fanny, as a pupil of the Royal Academy
of Music, received a prize in public. These
are his own words describing his feelings at
the time : " I could not bear to think of my-
self — beyond the reach of all such honorable

[12]

emulation and success. The tears ran down
my face. I felt as if my heart were rent. I
prayed, when I went to bed that night, to be
lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in
which I was. I never had suffered so much
before. There was no envy in this."^

Certainly this seems very like petty envy,
unless one can read the words with a clear
comprehension of the unquestionable fact that
a child of fourteen may have a dim prescience
of his later fame. Read this passage sympa-
thetically and it is easy to understand the
agony with which the child, dimly sure that
the vast world held great triumphs for him
somehow, somewhere, at some time, but as
yet too young to know how, where, or when,
and only sure of ridicule if he spoke out his
vague sensations, saw the doors of opportunity
slowly, inevitably for his little strength, closing
upon him. Grasp this state of mind, and the
misery of the " Warren's Blacking " experience
at once becomes clear.

But what had made the child intractably mis-
erable had made the youth extremely restless.
After some two years as an office lad with
lawyers, he recognized the painful slowness

1 Forster's Life, vol. i. p. 66.
[13 1

of any possible rise in the Law, and, ever ready
to better himself, took a hint from his father.
The latter had either recently learned short-
hand reporting or had within a few months
brought to mastery some knowledge of it
already acquired by him as a clerk to the Navy
at Portsmouth and Chatham. In David Cop-
perfield Dickens has described the persever-
ance by which he conquered the mysteries of
Gurney's system of shorthand : —

" I had heard that many men distinguished
in various pursuits had begun life by reporting
the debates in Parliament. Traddles having
mentioned newspapers to me, as one of his
hopes, I had put the two things together, and
told Traddles in my letter that I wished to know
how I could qualify myself for this pursuit. . .

" I bought an approved scheme of the noble
art and mystery of stenography (which cost
me ten and sixpence), and plunged into a sea
of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks,
to the confines of distraction. . . .

" It might have been quite heart-breaking, but
for Dora, who was the stay and anchor of my
tempest-driven bark. Every scratch in the
scheme was a gnarled oak in the forest of
difficulty, and I went on cutting them down,

[14]

one after another, with such vigor, that in
three or four months I was in a condition to
make an experiment on one of our crack
speakers in the Commons. Shall I ever forget
how the crack speaker walked oflF from me be-
fore I began, and left my imbecile pencil stag-
gering about the paper as if it were in a fit I "

All this indomitable purpose, however, was
eventually so eifective that a friend made in
the gallery of the House of Commons declared
long afterward : " There never was such a
shorthand reporter." Even as a youngster of
seventeen or eighteen, Dickens had discovered
the rules of life which were to carry him to
success : " Whatever I have tried to do in life,
I have tried with all my heart to do well.
What I have devoted myself to, I have de-
voted myself to completely. Never to put one
hand to anything on which I could throw
my whole self, and never to affect deprecia-
tion of my work, whatever it was, I find now
to have been my golden rules."

At first, after leaving Ellis and Blackmore,
he worked as a reporter for one of the ofllces
in Doctors' Commons, with some opportuni-
ties in other law courts. It would seem that
when he first met the Beadnell family he was

[15]

out of this drudgery, but was not as yet started
on his career as a parliamentary reporter. It
could not, however, have been very long after
this meeting that he joined the forces of the
True Sun, for this opening came to him in

1831.

Nor is the rapidity with which his intimacy
with the Beadnells developed at all remarkable.
A youth of unusual social capacity and per-
sonal charm found in the family a home life
that offered him much that he had, in his own
home, longed for in vain. The young men
frequenting the house numbered among them
two warm friends of his, David Lloyd and
Henry Kolle. Each of these was in love with
a daughter of Mr. Beadnell. Lloyd married the
eldest, Margaret, April 20, 18^1, and Kolle
married the second sister, Anne, May 21, 1833.
What wonder that young Dickens, following
suit, should fall in love with the youngest
daughter, Maria! Evidently Mrs. Beadnell
was kind to him, for he wrote of her: —

It chances to 've been by the fates brought about,
That she was the means of first bringing me out : —
All my thanks for that & her kindness since then
1 'd vainly endeavor to tell with my pen.^

1 See the verses in The Bill of Fare, infra.
[16]

What wonder, too, that Maria Beadnell flirted
with him, and rather desperately 1 One has
only to look at Mrs. Barrows' miniature of
Dickens at the age of eighteen to see the truth
of a description of him as a fellow-clerk in the
lawyers' office remembered him at sixteen, and
to understand how great must have been the
charm of his face when in the full play of ani-
mated conversation. The fellow-clerk wrote:

" He was rather a short but stout-built boy,
and carried himself very upright — his head
well up — and the idea he gave me was that
he must have been drilled by a military in-
structor. His dress in some measure, perhaps,
contributed to that impression. He wore a
frock-coat (or surtout, as it was then generally
called), buttoned up, of dark blue cloth, trousers
to match, and (as was the fashion at the time)
buttoned with leather straps over the boots;
black neckerchief, but no shirt collar showing.
His complexion was of healthy pink — almost
glowing — rather a round face, fine forehead,
beautiful expressive eyes full of animation, a
firmly set mouth, a good-sized, rather straight
nose, but not at all too large. His hair was a
beautiful brown, and worn long, as was then
the fashion. His cap was like the undress cap

[17]

of an officer in the army, of some shining ma-
terial with a narrow shining leather strap
running round the point of the chin. His ap-
pearance was altogether decidedly military. I
always thought he must have adopted this
from his having lived at Chatham. He looked
very clean and well fed and cared for."

Young Dickens was not only keenly intelli-
gent, he was also well read. He more than
once declared that he regarded these years of
his later teens as perhaps the most useful in
his life, and very properly, for when he was not
busy with his stenographic work or with mel-
lowing social intercourse he was reading assid-
uously at the British Museum. He took out
his first card on the eighth of February, 1830,
the earliest possible moment at which he
could have a card of his own. He had reached
eighteen, the prescribed age, the day before.

He had, too, that charm so telling with the
inexperienced and sentimental feminine mind
which springs from a reputed " knowledge of
the world." During the years between ten
and nineteen he saw a vast deal of London
life in all its ins and outs. He had had un-
usual opportunities to know its seamy side
from the days of his father's insolvency and

[18]

his own bitter associations with that social
Sindbad, the blacking establishment, through
his days in the lawyers' offices, to his work as
reporter even for the police courts. Dickens
once said of this period to Forster : " I looked at
nothing in particular, but nothing escaped me."

How worldly-wise he must have felt at
times when the other dark but frequent mood
of self-pity was not uppermost 1 How experi-
enced he must have seemed to the Beadnell
daughters, and even to his far less experienced
friends, Lloyd, the tea merchant, and Kolle, the
prosperous young quilt-printer 1 When one
remembers that a wild humor, a genius for
caricature, were with him inborn, one knows
his talk must have seemed to this young circle
of friends as brilliant as possible. Nor did he
at all lack the assurance necessary for bringing
out to the best conversational advantage his
memories and ideas. Skill in dealing with his
fellows was another inborn power. Forster
first met him, on the True Sun, when Dickens
had just been the successful leader of a strike
among the reporters.

To an unusual knowledge of the world and
a humorous appreciation of what he saw and
heard, young Dickens added great mimetic

[19]

power. Almost as early as we can trace
Dickens as a child we find him and his sister
on the table singing songs, and acting them
out as they sang, for the edification of admir-
ing parents and friends. The ability that
made his readings later in life famous all over
the English-speaking world was early mani-
fested. He thought seriously at one time —
apparently when he was about twenty — of
going on the stage.^

1 " I have often thought that I should certainly have been as suc-
cessful on the boards as I have been between them. When I was
about twenty, and knew three or four successive years of Mathews'
/it Homes from sitting in the pit to hear them, I wrote to Bartley,
who was stage manager at Covent Garden, and told him how young
I was, and exactly what I thought 1 could do ; and that I believed 1
had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural
power of reproducing in my own person what 1 had observed in
others. There must have been something in the letter that struck
the authorities, for Bartley wrote to me almost immediately to say
that they were busy getting up The Hunchback (so they were !) but
that they would communicate with me again, in a fortnight. Punc-
tual to the time another letter came with an appointment to do
anything of Mathews' I pleased before him and Charles Kemble on
a certain day at the theatre. My sister Fanny was in the secret and
was to go with me to play the songs. I was laid up when the day
came with a terrible bad cold and an inflammation of the face; the
beginning, by the bye, of that annoyance in one ear to which I am
subject at this day. I wrote to say so, and added that I would re-
sume my application next season. I made a great splash in the
Gallery soon afterwards ; the Chronicle opened to me, 1 had a dis-
tinction in the little world of the newspapers which made me like
it; began to write, didn't want money, had never thought of the

(20]

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Though the Beadnells did not, so far as we
know, share in his amateur theatricals, his
friend Kolle certainly did. By 1833 — whether
before or just after the break with Maria
Beadnell is not perfectly clear — Dickens was
engaged in writing a travesty of Shakespeare,
The O'Tbello, which was given privately by
his own family. In the same year he took the
leading parts in the group of plays named on
the program inserted opposite.^ It is earlier
than any other playbill of performances by
Dickens, and shows that he led all of his
family and his intimates into the work that
even when he was busiest later in life he could
find time to treat as play. Indeed the bill in-
troduces us to a group of friends in Dickens'
youth not before known to the public. Ap-

stage but as a means of getting it ; gradually left off turning my
thoughts that way; and never resumed the idea. I never told you
this, did I ? See how near I may have been to another sort of
life." Life, Forster, vol. ii. p. 205.

* Of the three pieces in the Bill, Clari, or The Maid of Milan,
is a musical drama in two acts, by John Howard Payne. It is
founded on the delights of home ; the part of Clari was originally
taken by Miss Paton and Miss M.Tree. The latter first brought
the song Home Sweet Home into its great repute.

The Married Bachelor, or Master and Man, is a farce in one act by
P. P. O'Callaghan. Elliston was the original representative of Sir
Charles, and Harley was the lying valet.

Was the third item, /tmateurs and Actors, written by Dickens
himself ?

[21]

Though the Beadnells did not, so far as we
know, share in his amateur theatricals, his
friend Kolle certainly did. By 1833 — whether
before or just after the break with Maria
Beadnell is not perfectly clear — Dickens was
engaged in writing a travesty of Shakespeare,
The O'Tbelb, which was given privately by
his own family. In the same year he took the
leading parts in the group of plays named on
the program inserted opposite.* It is earlier
than any other playbill of performances by
Dickens, and shows that he led all of his
family and his intimates into the work that
even when he was busiest later in life he could
find time to treat as play. Indeed the bill in-
troduces us to a group of friends in Dickens'
youth not before known to the public. Ap-

stage but as a means of getting it ; gradually left off turning my
thoughts that way ; and never resumed the idea. I never told you
this, did I ? See how near I may have been to another sort of
life." Life, Forster, vol. ii. p. 205.

1 Of the three pieces in the Bill, Clari, or The Maid of Milan,
is a musical drama in two acts, by John Howard Payne. It is
founded on the delights of home ; the part of Clari was originally
taken by Miss Paton and Miss M.Tree. The latter first brought
the song Home Sweet Home into its great repute.

The Married Bachelor, or Master and Man, is a farce in one act by
P. P. O'Callaghan. Elliston was the original representative of Sir
Charles, and Harley was the lying valet.

Was the third item, /tmateurs and Actors, written by Dickens
himself ?

[21]

parently all of the Dickens family except the
mother took part, for here are the father, John
Dickens, Miss [Fanny] Dickens, Letitia, who
later married the " Mr. H. Austin " of the cast,
and the two brothers, Frederick and Augustus.
Who John Urquhart and Miss Urquhart were
we do not know, nor can we with certainty
identify Mr. Boston, Mr. Milton, and Miss
Oppenheim ; but E. Barrow was doubtless a
cousin. Dickens later went on the Morning
Chronicle through an uncle John Barrow,
and the miniature previously referred to was
painted by another member of the family.
Mr. R. Austin was probably a brother or
cousin of Henry Austin.

Mr. Bramwell, who took the part of the
Duke Vivaldi, was a son of George Bramwell,
one of the partners in the well-known firm of
bankers, Dorrien, Magens, Dorrien and Mello.
He afterwards entered the law profession, in
which he rose rapidly, and became a Judge,
and a Peer of the Realm, as Lord Bramwell.

This early predilection for amateur theat-
ricals is particularly interesting because if one
overlooks his early and persistent passion for
the theatre one misses the chief key to the
secret of Dickens as a writer. He always saw

[22]

BIRTHPLACE OF CHARLES DICKENS

Engraved for The Bibliophile Society by J. A.
J. Wilcox.

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life, even in his maturer days, a little through
the shimmering haze of the old-fashioned gas
footlights of the melodrama theatres in which
he had passed many absorbed and happy hours.
Those theatres, and his acting in some of their
plays, gave him his love for striking situation,
for strong emotion created chiefly by horror ;
his liking for static character, rather than char-
acter in evolution ; his love for sharp contrasts,
particularly of gloom and mirth ; his fondness
for types and for identifying " tag " speeches.
It was his informing humor, his genius for
characterization of certain figures derived from
his unusual knowledge of London life, that
transmogrified melodrama and Pierce Egan
into his highly individual but masterly pic-
tures of his time.

What wonder that Maria Beadnell found
this youth, richly endowed and too much de-
lighted with his sensations as a lover to wish
at all to conceal his adoration, almost irre-
sistibly attractive ! What wonder, on the other
hand, that she coquetted with him — for there
was another side to the shield I How could
any worldly-wise parent regard this youth,
with all his attractiveness, as a wholly desirable
son-in-law? True, he was handsome, win-

[23]

some, full of promise, but he had only the
assets of a parliamentary reporter, and behind
him stood a large family, at best always in
straitened circumstances. Undoubtedly there
was much of the wilful coquette in Maria
Beadnell, for Dickens tells her in one of his
second set of letters that he remembers her
sister Anne writing to him '* once (in answer to
some burst of low-spirited madness of mine),
and saying, * My dear Charles, I really cannot
understand Maria, or venture to take any re-
sponsibility of saying what the state of her
affections is.'" As these later letters show,
there was much writing to and fro, and a Cor-
nish family servant devoted to Maria played
nurse to this Romeo and Juliet. There were
half-secret interviews, also, in the churches
and by-lanes in the neighborhood of the
Lombard Street house.

It is more than probable that some of the
vacillation, the unevenness of mood, of which
young Dickens wrote bitterly in the first set of
letters, arose from the young girl's struggle
between impulse and a sense of her duty
as strongly presented by kindly but unro-
mantic parents. After some impulsive re-
sponding to her ardent and fascinating wooer,

[24]

parental advice regained sway, or some other
suitor more favored by her elders pleaded his
cause, and the girl, looking Reason in the face,
wavered, and became distraite or chilling when
next she met young Dickens. Immediately
the nerves of this over-sensitive youth were
aquiver and his imagination rioted to fever
heat, with consequent hours of torturing self-
scrutiny and rebellion.

Apparently there was never any engage-
ment, further than a mutually implied un-
derstanding between the lovers, but in the
autumn of 1831 either Dickens showed an
amazing amount of assurance, which he cer-
tainly never lacked, or else at the time the
elder Beadnells regarded his parading of his
admiration for Maria Beadnell with amused
tolerance. In no other way can his frankness
in speaking of Miss Beadnell in The Bill of
Fare be explained.

The following lines, although mediocre as
verse, possess two highly important qualities :
they present the first authentic literary effort
of Dickens — a feature in itself of the great-
est interest — written some years before the
Sketches appeared, and they introduce us to
a group of his friends not mentioned in his

125]

Letters, or even in Forster's Life, and give us
at the same time a means of understanding
the first group of letters.

Though Goldsmith might appreciate the
compliment to his Retaliation shown in the
general plan of these verses, it is painful to
think how their labored measures would have
rasped upon the delicate sensitiveness of his
ear.

Mr. Langton, in his Childhood and Youth
of Charles Dickens, says: "There is, I fancy,
internal evidence in some of Dickens' very
earliest works, of his having studied these
burlesques and travesties [of The Portfolio, a
publication in vogue for some time after 1823]
to some purpose. There is still stronger evi-
dence of this study, I am told, in some early
attempts that were never printed."

THE BILL OF FARE

By Charles Dickens

As the great rage just now is imitation,
'Mong high-born and low, throughout the whole Nation,
1 trust 't will excuse the few following lines.
Of which I '11 say nothing, save these very poor rhymes,
As you might expect, in degenerate days

[26]

Like these, are entitled to no share of praise

Because they are novel, — the ground Work, at least,

Is a copy from Goldsmith's ever famed Feast.

" And a bad one it is too," — you '11 say, 1 fear ;

But let me entreat you, don't be too severe. —

If, in a fair face, 't will elicit a smile.

If one single moment 't will serve to beguile, —

I shall think on it with great satisfaction,

Et cet'ra, — and so forth : — now then to action !

Without further preface to waste the time in,

We '11 set to at once, — (if you please we '11 begin.)

We '11 say a small party to Dinner are met.

And the guests are themselves about to be eat ;

Without saying Grace, — (I own I 'm a Sinner, — )

We '11 endeavor to see what we 've for dinner.

Mr. Beadnell 's a good fine sirloin of beef,

Though to see him cut up would cause no small grief ;

And then Mrs. Beadnell, I think I may name,

As being an excellent Rib of the same.

The Miss B's ^ are next, who it must be confessed

Are two nice little Ducks, and very well dressed.

William Moule 's '^ of a trifle, or trifling dish ;

Mr. Leigh ' we all know is a very great fish ;

Mrs. Leigh a Curry, smart, hot, and biting,

Although a dish that is always inviting.

For cooking our meat we utensils won't lack ;

' 1 Two only, because the eldest, Margaret, of the three had be-
come Mrs. David Lloyd in March, 1831.

2 William Moule, who Hved in Pound Lane, Lower Clapton.

8 John Porter Leigh, corn-dealer, who hved at Lea Bridge Road,
Lower Clapton, in 1828-33.

[27]

So Miss Leigh shall be called a fine roasting Jack, —

A thing of great use, when we dine or we sup,

A patent one too ! — never wants winding up.

Mr. Moule 's a bottle of excellent Port ;

Mrs. Moule of Champagne, — good humor 's her forte ;

The Miss M's of Snipe are a brace, if you please,

And Joe is a very fine flavored Dutch-Cheese ;

Mrs. Lloyd and her spouse * are a nice side dish,

(Some type of their most happy state I much wish

To produce ; — let me see, I 've found out one soon)

Of Honey and sweets in the form of a Moon.

Arthur Beetham,* — this dish has cost me some pains, —

Is a tongue with a well made garnish of brains ;

M'Namara, I think, must by the same rule

Be a dish of excellent gooseberry-fool ;

And Charles Dickens, who in our Feast plays a part,

Is a young Summer Cabbage, without any heart ; —

Not that he 's heartless, but because, as folks say,

He lost his, twelve months ago from last May.

Now let us suppose that the dinner is done.

And the guests have roll'd on the floor one by one ; —

I don't mean to say they 're at the completion,

Trying the fam'd city cure for repletion ;

Nor do I by any means raise up the question

Whether they owe their deaths to indigestion.

We '11 say they 're all dead ; it 's a terrible sight.

But I '11 dry my tears, and their Epitaphs write :

1 David Lloyd, a tea-merchant of Wood Lane, a friend of Dickens'
very early days. Dickens puns on their honeymoon, spent in Paris,
in the spring of 1831.

2 A young surgeon, who lived in the parish of All Hallows, Lon-
don Wall. He died in December, 1834.

[28]

Here lies Mr. Beadnell, beyond contradiction,
An excellent man, and a good politician ;
His opinions were always sound and sincere,
Come here ! ye Reformers, o'er him drop a tear :
Come here and with me weep at his sudden end,
Ye who 're to ballot and freedom a friend.
Come here, all of ye who to him ever listened,
Praise one rare quality — he was consistent ;
And if any one can say so much for you
We '11 try to write on you an epitaph too.
He was most hospitable, friendly, and kind ;
An enemy, I 'm sure, he 's not left behind ;
And if he be fairly, and all in all ta'en,
" We never shall look upon his like again."

Here lies Mrs. Beadnell, whose conduct through life.

As a mother, a Woman, a friend, a Wife,

I shall think, while I possess recollection,

Can be summ'd up in one word — PERFECTION.

Her faults I 'd tell you beyond any doubt.

But for this plain reason — I ne'er found them out :

Her character from my own Knowledge I tell.

For when living she was, 1 then knew her well :

It chances to 've been by the Fates brought about,

That she was the means of first bringing me out ; —

All my thanks for that and her kindness since then

1 'd vainly endeavor to tell with my pen :

1 think what I say, — I feel it, that 's better,

Or I 'd scorn to write of these lines one letter.

Excuse me, dear reader, for pause now I must ;
Here two charming Sisters lie low in the dust : —

[29]

But why should I pause ? do they want my poor aid

To tell of their virtues while with us they stayed ?

Can a few words from me add a hundredth part

To the regret felt for them in every heart ?

No, no ! 't is impossible : still I must try

To speak of them here, for I can't pass them by.

And first then for Anne I '11 my banner unfurl —

A truly delightful and sweet tempered girl ;

And, what 's very odd, and will add to her fame,

Is this one plain fact, — she was always the same.

She was witty, clever, — you liked what she said ;

Without being Hue, she was very well read.

Her favorite Author, or else I 'm a fibber.

And have been deceived, was the famed Colley » Gibber.

I don't think, dear reader, 't will interest you,

But still, if you please, keep that quite entre nous.

I grow tedious, so of her 1 '11 not din more, —

Oh ! — she sometimes drest her hair d la Cbinois.

Ladies, if you want this fashion to follow.

And don't know where you the pattern can borrow,

Don't look in " the fashions " 'mong bows and wreathings,

You '11 find it on any antique China Tea things.

But who have we here ? alas what sight is this !

Has her spirit flown back to regions of bliss ?

Has Maria left this World of trouble and care

Because for us she was too good and too fair ?

Has Heaven in its jealousy ta'en her away

As a blessing too great for us children of clay ?

All ye fair and beautiful, sadly come here,

1 Dickens puns on the name of his friend Kolle, later married
to Anne Beadnell, — in 1833.

[30]

And Spring's early flowers strew over her bier ;

Fit emblems are they of life's short fleeting day,

Fit tributes are they to her memory to pay ;

For though blooming now, they will soon be decayed,

They blossom one moment, then wither and fade.

I linger here now, and I hardly know why,

1 've no wish, no hope now, but this one, — to die.

My bright hopes and fond wishes were all centred here —

Their brightness has vanished, they're now dark and

drear.
The impression that Memory engraves in my heart
Is all I have left, and with that I ne'er part.
I might tell you much, and I say 't with a sigh,
Of the grace of her form, and the glance of her eye ;
I might tell of happy days now pass'd away.
Which I fondly hoped then would never decay.
But 't were useless — I should only those times deplore,
I know that again I can see them no more.^
But what 's this small form that she folds to her breast,
As if it had only laid down there to rest ?
Poor thing is it living ? — Ah no, it 's dead quite ;
It is a small dog, liver-colored and white.^
Dear me, now I see — 't is the little dog that
Would eat mutton chops if you cut off the fat. \

So very happy was its situation,
An object it was of such admiration,
That I 'd resign all my natural graces.
E'en now if I could with '* Daphne " change places.

1 Little did Dickens dream at the time of writing this how accur-
ately he was foretelling his future.
* Dora's pet dog, Jip.

[311

William Moule next, alas, with the dead lieth here,

And his loss we shall ne'er recover I fear ;

No more shall the young men, among whom am I,

Regard with great envy his elegant tie ;

No more shall the girls with anxiety wait

At a party, and mourn that he came in late ;

Though it was not his fault, it must be confess'd

We knew very well that he lived " in the West " *

And men of great fashion now never go out,

Till long after twelve when engaged to a rout.

No more shall he waltz an hour with one lady,

To the delight of his tut'ress Miss A. B.

Who no more shall turn to me, and whispering low.

Say " Does n't he waltz well ? I taught him, you know."

No more shall he curse all the City Folks' Balls,

And vow that he never will honor their halls ;

No more from " the London " will he be turned back

Because of his wearing a Kerchief of Black ;

No more when we sit round the blithe supper table

Shall he hush to silence the prattling Babel,

By, — When a lady a speech made upon her, —

Rising to return us her thanks for the honor.

No more, — But 1 think 1 '11 use that phrase no more,

I feel that I can't this loss enough deplore.

Momus and Bacchus, both be merry no more,
Your friend Mr. Leigh now lies dead on the floor.
Weep both of ye ; each hide your sorrowful head,
For he isn't dead drunk, but he 's really dead.
We shall never again see his good humored face,

1 The purlieus of Tottenham Court Road. [In original.]

[32]

We shall never again much admire the grace

With which he would drink off his bottle of Wine,

Or with which he 'd ask you next Sunday to dine.

We shall never again laugh aloud at his fun,

We shall never in turn amuse him with a pun.

In his Will i hope as a Legacy that

He 's left me that elegant, pretty, dress hat.

The Shape, make, and color of which were so rare,

And which on all extra occasions he 'd Wear.

I really do his loss most deeply regret,

As the kindest best temper'd man I e'er met.

I 'm as hale and as hearty as any one here.

So I '11 help to carry him to his new bier.

Mrs. Leigh's life, alas, has come to an end ; —

But I can't speak of her I fear to offend ;

I don't think the truth need her feelings much gall.

But if I can't tell it I won't write at all.

If 't were not for the lesson that I 've been taught

I'd have painted her as in justice I ought ;

I 'd have said she was friendly, good hearted, and kind,

Her wit I 'd have praised and intelligent mind ;

'Bout scandal or spreading reports without heed.

Of course I 'd say nothing, how could I indeed ?

Because if I did I should certainly lie,

And my remarks here doubtless would not apply ;

So as I fear either to praise or to blame,

I will not her faults or her virtues here name.

And Mary Anne Leigh's death 1 much regret too,
Though the greatest tormentor that I e'er knew ;
Whenever she met you, at morn, noon, or night,

[33]

To tease and torment you was her chief delight ;
To each glance or smile she 'd a meaning apply,
On every flirtation she kept a sharp eye.
Though — tender feelings I trust I 'm not hurting, —
She ne'er herself much objected to flirting.^
She to each little secret always held the candle.
And 1 think she liked a small bit of scandal.
I think, too, that she used to dress her hair well,
Although Arthur said, — but that tale I won't tell.
In short though she was so terribly teasing.
So pretty she looked, her ways were so pleasing.
That when she had finished I used to remain
Half fearing, half hoping to be teased again.

Here lies — Mr. Moule, at whose plentiful board
We often have sat, and where, with one accord.
Mirth, pleasure, good humor and capital Wine,
Seem'd always to meet when one went there to dine.
To his friends he was always good humored and kind,
And a much better host 't would be hard to find.
If he for an instant his good humor missed
I 've heard it would be at a rubber of Whist ;
At least 1 've sometimes heard his Partners say so ;
Though of course I myself this fact cannot know.
His hospitality deserved great credit ;
Indeed I much wish all men did inherit
That merit from him ; I 'm sure it is needed
That some should prize it as highly as he did.
I think his opinions were not always quite
So kind or so just as they should be of right.

1 A singular fact. [This note is in original.]

[34]

However, that question I '11 not travel through,
'T would not I think become me so to do.
Some others in this point like him we may see,
So I will say requiescat in pace.

Mrs. Moule, alas, lieth here with the dead,
Her good temper vanished, her light spirits fled ;
I 'd say much of her, but all knew her too well
To leave anything new for me here to tell ;
So I '11 only say, — in thus speaking of her
I 'm sure all she e'er knew will concur —
If kindness and temper as virtues are held
She never by any one yet was excelled.

Louisa Moule 's next, — I can't better call her

Than the same pattern, — N. B. a size smaller.

Here lies Fanny Moule, of whom 't may be said,

That romance or sentiment quite turned her head.

Her chief pleasure was, I cannot tell why

To sit by herself in a corner and sigh.

You might talk for an hour to her, thinking she heard.

And find out at last she had not heard a word ;

She 'd start, turn her head, — the case was a hard one, -

And say with a sigh, *' Dear ! I beg your pardon."

Whether this arose from love, doubt, hesitation.

Or whether indeed, 't was all affectation,

I will not by my own decision abide,

I '11 leave it to others the point to decide.

Thus much though, I will say, — 1 think it is droll.

That one who so pleasing might be on the whole

Should take so much trouble, it must be a toil,

All her charms and graces entirely to spoil.

[35]

Here lies honest Joe, and 1 'm sure when I say

That he 'd a good heart, there's no one will say nay.

The themes, of all others on which he would doat

Were splendid gold lace and a flaming red coat ;

His mind always ran on battles and slaughters.

Guards, Bands, Kettledrums and splendid Head Quarters.

I 've heard that the best bait to catch a young girl

Is a red coat and a moustachio's curl ;

Bait your hook but with this, and Joe would soon bite ;

Hint at it, he 'd talk on from morning to night.

In portraits of Soldiers he spent all his hoard ;

You talked of a penknife — he thought of a sword.

Inspecting accounts he ne'er could get through ;

His mind would revert to some former review.

He ne'er made a bill out smaller or larger

But he thought he was then mounting his charger.

He ne'er to the counting house trudged in a heat

But he thought oi forced marches and a retreat ;

And ne'er from the play to his home went again

But trembling he thought of the roll call at Ten.

But fallen at last is this " gay young deceiver,"

A prey to Death and a bad Scarlet fever.

Here lies Mrs. Lloyd, I am sorry to say
That she too from us is so soon snatched away ;
That her fate is most hard it can't be denied,
When we think how recently she was a bride.
That she became one is no source of surprise,
For if all that 's charming in critical eyes
Is likely to finish a dull single life
I 'm sure that she ought t've been long since a wife.
Though we lament one so pleasing, so witty,

[36]

And though her death we may think a great pitty,

I really myself do quite envy her fate,

And I wish when with Death 1 've my tete a tSte,

He 'd do me the favor to take me away

When my prospects here were bright, blooming and gay,

When I 'm quite happy, ere with sorrows jaded,

I wish for my grave when my hopes are faded, —

When I might be certain of leaving behind

Those who would ne'er cease to bear me in mind.

She 's gone and who shall now those sweet ballads sing

Which still in my ears so delightfully ring ?

" We met," ** Friends depart," — I those sweet sounds

retain.
And I feel I shall never forget them again.

And down here Mr. Lloyd's remains lie beside
Those of his so recently blooming young bride.
I 'm sorry he 's dead, for I knew him to be
Good humored, most honest, kind hearted and free.
That he was consistent, I ne'er had a doubt.
Although scandal said, and 't was whispered about.
That when he last summer from Paris came home
(I think 't was his marriage induced him to roam)
He his principles changed, — so runs the story,
Threw off the Whigs, and became a staunch Tory.
Be that as it may, I think it 's but fair,
To say that I know that he enjoyed the fresh air.

And is Arthur Beetham for the first time hush'd >
And has he returned to his original dust ?
Has he gone the way of all flesh with the rest,

[37]

And in spite of the great care he took of his Chest,^
At our snug coteries will he never make one ?
Will he never again gladden us with his fun ?
Poor fellow ! 1 fear, now he 's laid in the earth,
That of our amusement we '11 all find a dearth ;
And yet he 'd his faults, — to speak without joking,
He had a knack of being very provoking ;
So much so that several times t' other day
I devoutly, heartily, wished him away ;
But after I 'd done so, my Conscience me smote —
And here perhaps a couple of lines I may quote —
Missing his mirth and agreeable vein,
1 directly wished him back again.

And does M'Namara with the dead recline ?

Poor Francis, his waistcoats were wond'rously fine ;

He certainly was an elegant fellow.

His coats were well made, his gloves a bright yellow ;

Florists shall hold up his Pall by the corners,

Morgan'' and Watkins' shall be his chief mourners.

Last, here 's Charles Dickens who 's now gone for ever ;
It 's clear that he thought himself very clever ;
To all his friends' faults — it almost makes me weep.
He was wide awake — to his own fast asleep.
Though blame he deserves for such wilful blindness,
He had one merit — he ne'er forgot kindness.

1 The reason assig^ied by Mr. A. B. for constantly wearing his
coat buttoned up to his chin was his extreme anxiety to preserve
his chest from cold. [This note is in original.]

2 A celebrated glove-maker. [This note is in original.]
8 A celebrated Tailor. [This note is in original.]

[38]

Perhaps I don't do right to call that a merit

Which each human creature 's bound to inherit ;

But when old Death claimed the debt that he owed him,

He felt most grateful for all that was showed him.

His faults, — and they were not in number few.

As all his acquaintance extremely well knew,

Emanated, — to speak of him in good part —

I think rather more from the head than the heart.

His death was n't sudden, he had long been ill, —

Slowly he languished and got worse, until

No mortal means could the poor young fellow save,

And a sweet pair of eyes sent him home to his grave.

There is much of the character of Dickens
in these lines, in the veiled impudence toward
Mrs. Leigh, in his flattery of Mrs. Beadnell,
in the swift turn to serious sentimentality in
the last few lines, in the reprimand given Fanny
Moule. They were evidently written in the
autumn of 1831 ; for Dickens, in speaking of
David Lloyd, mentions his visit to Paris " last
summer " and " his marriage " as the occasion.
The Lloyds — they were married in April,
1831 — passed their honeymoon in Paris.

As to Maria Beadnell, he wrote much more
effectively of the " grace of her form and the
glance of her eye " when he gave her to pos-
terity as Dora. Between the autumn of I831
and the letters of 1833, Miss Beadnell was sent

[39]

to Paris for " finishing oflf," as the common-
place old phrase went. Or was the real reason
the aroused fears of the elder Beadnells that
this fascinating but penniless young Dickens
might actually win for good and all the heart
of their daughter? Whatever the cause of
her absence, during it Dickens nursed his love
till it became infatuation. To him, full of
unqualified devotion, the girl on her return
seemed changeable and distant, yet ready to
keep him dangling as an offset to other lovers.
Whatever may have been the cause, — her
instability of mood, her unsureness as to her
exact feelings, or a sense of duty to her par-
ents,— she wrung the young fellow's heart.
It was Maria Beadnell who taught Dickens to
understand the bewildered wretchedness of
Pip in his love aifair, in Great Expectations.
Pip said of Estella : —

" She made use of me to tease other admir-
ers, and she turned the very familiarity be-
tween herself and me to the account of putting
a constant slight on my devotion to her. If I
had been her secretary, steward, half-brother,
poor relation — if I had been a younger brother
of her appointed husband — I could not have
seemed to myself further from my hopes

[40]

when I was nearest to her. The privilege of
calling her by her name and hearing her call
me by mine, became under the circumstances
an aggravation of my trials ; and while I think
it likely that it almost maddened her other
lovers, I knew too certainly that it almost
maddened me. She had admirers without
end. . . . There were picnics, fete days, plays,
operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
through which I pursued her — and they were
all miseries to me. I never had one hour's
happiness in her society, and yet my mind, all
round the four-and-twenty hours, was harping
on the happiness of having her with me unto
death."

Compare with the foregoing this passage
from the first of the letters to follow: —

"Thank God I can claim for myself and
feel that I deserve the merit of having ever
throughout our intercourse acted fairly, in-
telligibly and honorably. Under kindness and
encouragement one day and a total change of
conduct the next I have ever been the same. I
have ever acted without reserve. I have never
held out encouragement which I knew I never
meant; I have never indirectly sanctioned
hopes which I well knew I did not intend to

[41]

fulfil ; I have never made a mock confidante
to whom to entrust a garbled story for my
own purposes, and I think I never should
(though God knows I am not likely to have
the opportunity) encourage one dangler as a
useful shield for — an excellent set off against
— others more fortunate and doubtless more
deserving."

At the date of these verses Dickens had not,
apparently, come to distrust ** Mary Anne "
Leigh, or, as he calls her later in his letters —
the change probably originated with her —
Marianne Leigh. The tone of —

So pretty she looked, her ways were so pleasing,
That when she had finished I used to remain
Half fearing, half hoping to be teased again —

is very diflferent from the biting sarcasm of
his letter to her in 18^3.

The very qualities in her that Dickens had
censured in the following lines ultimately
brought about the catastrophe in this love
affair : —

Whenever she met you, at morn, noon, or night.
To tease and torment you was her chief delight ;
To each glance or smile she 'd a meaning apply,
On every flirtation she kept a sharp eye.

[42]

Though — tender feelings I trust I 'm not hurting, —
She ne'er herself much objected to flirting.
She to each little secret always held the candle,
And I think she liked a small bit of scandal.

Mary Anne Leigh stopped at nothing to
embroil the lovers. Possessed of personal at-
tractions and a lively wit, she had inherited in
marked degree the bad qualities of her mother
and was a born mischief-maker. It looks as if,
being herself in love with Dickens, she made
use of all around her, even his sister Fanny,
to bring misunderstandings between the lovers.
She told Maria Beadnell that all the stages of
the love affair had been confided to her. Evi-
dently she wished to imply that this was a
mark of the deeper confidence and possibly
affection which Dickens felt for her. Certainly
the letters show that she brought matters to
such a pass that Miss Beadnell had to choose
between the word of her friend and that of her
lover. When she showed that she would not
entirely throw over Miss Leigh, young Dickens,
outraged by her vacillation, by the consequent
bickerings, and, above all, by her failure com-
pletely to accept his straightforward statement
of his real relations with Miss Leigh, broke off
the already strained relationship.

[43]

All of Miss Beadnell's letters to Dickens
have disappeared — perhaps they perished in
the epistolary holocaust of i860, already men-
tioned. Of his letters to her only the follow-
ing five survive. In exasperation at what has
passed he writes a touchingly boyish set of
letters, in which his misery of mind breaks
through the sentences which try to be dig-
nified and restrained. But not even his misery
sweeps him out of the self-pity and self-con-
sciousness that were throughout his life char-
acteristic. One feels, in reading these letters,
that however well the manly air was main-
tained by the somewhat stilted phrases, it
concealed bitter heart-burnings and tempests
of outraged Dride as well as deeply wounded
affection.

The somewhat loose phrasing, the punctu-
ation, often most conspicuous for its absence
in the originals, probably result more from the
great excitement of the youth as he wrote
than from his inexperience as an author. Yet
both are in sharp contrast with the skilled
phrase and the adequate punctuation of the
second set of letters.

Unfortunately, the first set of letters is not
dated ; consequently it is nearly impossible to

[44]

be sure what is their correct order, for their
contents permit them to be arranged in more
than one way.

Miss Hogarth in the Letters said of the early
correspondence: "He had a careless habit in
those days about dating his letters, very fre-
quently putting only the day of the week on
which he wrote, curiously in contrast with the
habit of his later life, when his dates were
always of the very fullest."

18 Bentinck Street,!
March tSth

Dear Miss Beadnell, — Your own feelings will en-
able you to imagine far better than any attempt of mine
to describe the painful struggle it has cost me to make
up my mind to adopt the course which 1 now take — a
course than which nothing can be so directly opposed to
my wishes and feelings, but the necessity of which be-
comes daily more apparent to me. Our meetings of late
have been little more than so many displays of heartless
indifference on the one hand, while on the other they
have never failed to prove a fertile source of wretchedness
and misery ; and seeing, as 1 cannot fail to do, that I have
engaged in a pursuit which has long since been worse than

1 The paper of this letter is watermarked, " G. H. Green, 1831."
But the text of this and the succeeding letters show that this was
written in March, 1833. This letter is a copy in Maria Beadnell's
handwriting, the original having been returned by her to Dickens,
as stated in his letter at page 52, infra.

[45]

hopeless and a further perseverance in which can only
expose me to deserved ridicule, 1 have made up my
mind to return the little present I received from you
sometime since (which 1 have always prized, as 1 still do,
far beyond anything I ever possessed) and the other
enclosed mementos of our past correspondence which
I am sure it must be gratifying to you to receive, as after
our recent relative situations they are certainly better
adapted for your custody than mine.

Need I say that I have not the most remote idea of
hurting your feelings by the few lines which I think it
necessary to write with the accompanying little parcel ?
I must be the last person in the world who could entertain
such an intention, but I feel that this is neither a matter
nor a time for cold, deliberate, calculating trifling. My
feelings upon any subject, more especially upon this, must
be to you a matter of very little moment ; still / have feel-
ings in common with other people, — perhaps as far as
they relate to you they have been as strong and as good
as ever warmed the human heart, — and I do feel that it
is mean and contemptible of me to keep by me one gift of
yours or to preserve one single line or word of remem-
brance or affection from you, I therefore return them,
and I can only wish that I could as easily forget that 1
ever received them.

I have but one more word to say and I say it in my
own vindication. The result of our past acquaintance is
indeed a melancholy one to me. 1 have felt too long
ever to lose the feeling of utter desolation and wretched-
ness which has succeeded our former correspondence.
Thank God I can claim for myself znd feel that 1 deserve

[46]

-^'. ^ Vi ^

-1 V ,

:K 1

the merit of having ever throughout our intercourse acted
fairly, intelligibly and honorably. Under kindness and
encouragement one day and a total change of conduct
the next I have ever been the same. 1 have ever acted
without reserve. 1 have never held out encouragement
which I knew I never meant; I have never indirectly
sanctioned hopes which I well knew I did not intend to
fulfil. 1 have never made a mock confidante to whom
to entrust a garbled story for my own purposes, and I
think I never should (though God knows I am not likely
to have the opportunity) encourage one dangler as a use-
ful shield for — an excellent set off against — others more
fortunate and doubtless more deserving. I have done
nothing that I could say would be very likely to hurt
you. If (I can hardly believe it possible) I have said
any thing which can have that effect I can only ask you
to place yourself for a moment in my situation, and you
will find a much better excuse than I can possibly devise.
A wish for your happiness altho' it comes from me may
not be the worse for being sincere and heartfelt. Accept
it as it is meant, and believe that nothing will ever afford
me more real delight than to hear that you, the object
of my first and my last love are happy. If you are as
happy as I hope you may be, you will indeed possess
every blessing that this world can afford.

CD.

Miss Maria Beadnell

The following letter is undated, and its paper
has no watermark. Yet it would appear from
its contents that it just preceded those which

[471

the merit of having ever throughout our intercourse acted
fairly, intelligibly and honorably. Under kindness and
encouragement one day and a total change of conduct
the next I have ever been the same. 1 have ever acted
without reserve. 1 have never held out encouragement
which I knew I never meant; I have never indirectly
sanctioned hopes which I well knew I did not intend to
fulfil. I have never made a mock confidante to whom
to entrust a garbled story for my own purposes, and I
think I never should (though God knows I am not likely
to have the opportunity) encourage one dangler as a use-
ful shield for — an excellent set off against — others more
fortunate and doubtless more deserving. I have done
nothing that I could say would be very likely to hurt
you. If (I can hardly believe it possible) I have said
any thing which can have that effect I can only ask you
to place yourself for a moment in my situation, and you
will find a much better excuse than I can possibly devise.
A wish for your happiness altho' it comes from me may
not be the worse for being sincere and heartfelt. Accept
it as it is meant, and believe that nothing will ever afford
me more real delight than to hear that you, the object
of my first and my last love are happy. If you are as
happy as I hope you may be, you will indeed possess
every blessing that this world can afford.

CD.

Miss Maria Beadnell

The following letter is undated, and its paper
has no watermark. Yet it would appear from
its contents that it just preceded those which

[47]

are printed after it. Indeed, it looks as if the
remaining five letters were all written during
the week preceding that of May 21, 183^,
when Anne Beadnell was married to Henry
Kolle. It is of Kolle's honeymoon that young
Dickens is thinking when in the last letter of
this series he says, " Knowing that the oppor-
tunity of addressing you through Kolle will
shortly be lost."

There had now been a breach lasting per-
haps two months: —

I do feel, Miss Beadnell, after my former note to you
that common delicacy and a proper feeling of consider-
ation alike require that I should without a moment's
delay inform you (as 1 did verbally yesterday) that I never,
by word or deed, in the slightest manner, directly or by
implication, made in any way a confidante of Mary
Anne Leigh, and never was I more surprised, never did
I endure more heartfelt annoyance and vexation than to
hear yesterday by chance that days even weeks ago she
had made this observation — not having the slightest
idea that she had done so of course it was out of my
power to contradict it before. Situated as we have been
once I have — laying out of consideration every idea of
common honour not to say common honesty — too often
thought of our earlier correspondence, and too often
looked back to happy hopes the loss of which have
made me the miserable reckless wretch I am, to breathe
the slightest hint to any creature living of one single

[48]

circumstance that ever passed between us — much less
to her.

In replying to your last note I denied Mary Anne
Leigh's interference, and I did so hoping to spare you the
pain of any recrimination with her. Her duplicity and
disgusting falsehood, however, renders it quite unneces-
sary to conceal the part she has acted, and I therefore
have nov/ no hesitation in saying that she, quite unasked,
volunteered the information that YOU had made her a
confidante of all that had ever passed between us with-
out reserve. In proof of which assertion she not only de-
tailed facts which I undoubtedly thought she could have
heard from none but yourself, but she also communicated
many things which certainly never occurred at all, equally
calculated to excite something even more than ordinary
angry feelings.

On hearing this yesterday (and no consideration on
earth shall induce me ever to forget or forgive Fanny's *
not telling me of it before) my first impulse was to go to
Clapton : my next to prevent misrepresentation, to write
immediately. I thought on reflection however that the
most considerate and proper course would be to state to
you exactly what I wish to do. I ask your consent pre-
viously for this reason — because it is possible that you
may think that my writing a violent note would have the
effect of exciting ill nature which had better be avoided. I
candidly own that I am most anxious to write. I care as
little for her malice as I do for her, but as you are a party
who would perhaps be mixed up with her story I think
it is proper to ask you whether you object to my send-

1 His sister.
[49]

ing the note which I have already written. I need hardly
say that if it be sent at all it should be at once, and I
therefore hope to receive your decision tomorrow, as-
suring you that I will abide by it whatever it be.

I will not detain you or intrude upon your attention
by any more observations. I fear 1 could say little
calculated to interest or please you. I have no hopes to
express, no wishes to communicate. I am past the one
and must not think of the other. Though surprised at
such inconceivable duplicity I can express no pleasure at
the discovery, for I have been so long used to inward
wretchedness and real, real misery, that it matters little,
very little to me what others may think of or what
becomes of me — I have to apologize for troubling you
at all but I hope you will believe that a sense of respect
for and deference to your feelings has elicited this note
to which I have once again to beg your immediate
answer.

Charles Dickens

18 Bentinck Street,
Tuesday Afternoon.

18 Bentinck Street,
Thursday 4 o'clock.

I cannot forbear replying to your note this moment
received, Miss Beadnell, because you really seem to have
made two mistakes. In the first place you do not exactly
understand the nature of my feelings with regard to your
alleged communications to M[ary] A[nne] L[eigh], and
in the next you certainly totally and entirely misunder-
stand my feeling with regard to her — that you could
suppose, as you clearly do (that is to say if the subject

[50]

is worth a thought to you), that I have ever really
thought of M A L in any other than my old way you
are mistaken. That she has for some reason and to suit
her own purposes, of late thrown herself in my way, I
could plainly see, and I know it was noticed by others.
For instance on the night of the play,^ after we went up
stairs -I could not get rid of her. God knows that I have
no pleasure in speaking to her or any girl living, and
never had. May I say thdA you have ever been the sole
exception ? " Kind words and winning looks " have
done much, much with me — but not from her — unkind
words and cold looks, however, have done much, much
more. That I have been the subject of both from
you as your will altered and your pleasure changed, /
know well — and so I think must you. I have often said
before, and I say again, 1 have borne more from you
than I do believe any creature breathing ever bore from
a woman before. The slightest hint, however, even now
of change or transfer of feeling I cannot bear and do not
deserve.

Again, I never supposed nor did this girl give me to
understand that you ever breathed a syllable against me.
It is quite a mistake on your part, but knowing (and
there cannot be a stronger proof of my disliking her)
what she was ; knowing her admirable qualifications for
a confidante and recollecting what had passed between
ourselves, I was more than hurt, more than annoyed at
the bare idea of your confiding the tale to her of all
people living. I reflected upon it. I coupled her com-
munication with what I saw (with a jaundiced eye per-

1 Perhaps his burlesque The O'Thello.
[51]

haps) of your own conduct ; on the very last occasion
of seeing you before writing that note^ 1 heard even
among your own friends (and there was no Mary Ann
present), I heard even among them remarks on your own
conduct and pity — pity, Good God ! — for my situa-
tion, and I did think (you will pardon my saying it for I
am describing my then feelings and not my present) that
the same light butterfly feeling which prompted the one
action could influence the other. Wretched, aye almost
brokenhearted, I wrote to you — (I have the note for
you returned it,'' and even now I do think it was written
" more in sorrow than in anger," and to my mind — I
had almost said to your better judgment — it must appear
to breathe anything but an unkind or bitter feeling), —
you replied to the note. I wrote another and that at
least was expressive of the same sentiments as I ever
had felt and ever should feel towards you to my dying
day. That note you sent me back by hand wrapped in
a small loose piece of paper without even the formality
of an envelope and that note I wrote after receiving
yours. It is poor sport to trifle on a subject like this :
I knew what your feelings must have been and by them
I regulated my conduct.

To return to the question of what is best to be done.
I go to KoUe's at 10 o'clock tomorrow Evening and I
will inclose to you and give to him then a copy of the
note which if I send any I will send to Marianne Leigh.
I do not ask your advice ; all I ask is whether you see any

1 The one of March 18 in which he broke off all relations with
Maria Beadnell.

2 This explains why the first letter is in Maria Beadnell' s hand,
not that of Dickens.

[52]

reason to object. You will perhaps inclose it after read-
ing it, and say whether you object to its going or not.

With regard to Fanny if she owed a duty to you she
owed a greater one to me — and for this reason because
she knew what Marianne Leigh had said oi you; she
heard from you what she had said of me and yet she had
not the fairness the candour the feeling to let me know
it — and if 1 were to live a hundred years I never would
forgive it.

As to sending my last note back, pray do not consult
my feelings hut your own. Look at the note itself. Do
you think it is unkind, cold, hasty, or conciliatory and
deliberate? 1 shall — indeed I need — express no wish
upon the subject. You will act as you think best. It is
too late for me to attempt to influence your decision. I
have said doubtless both in this and my former note
much more than perhaps I ought or should have said had
I attempted disguise or concealment to you and I have
no doubt more than is agreeable to yourself. Towards
you 1 never had and never can have an angry feeling.
If you had ever felt for me one hundredth part of my
feeling for you there would have been little cause of
regret, little coldness little unkindness between us. My
feeling on one subject was early roused; it has been
strong, and it will be lasting. I am in no mood to
quarrel with any one for not entertaining similar senti-
ments, and least of all, Miss Beadnell, with you. You
will think of what I have said and act accordingly —
Destitute as I am of hope or comfort, 1 have borne
much and I dare say can bear more.

Yours, Charles Dickens

[53]

The following letter, dated only "Friday,"
was evidently written the day after the pre-
ceding. Recall the words : " I go to Kolle's at
10 o'clock tomorrow Evening and I will in-
close to you and give to him then a copy of
the note which if I send any I will send to
Marianne Leigh." —

Agreeably to my promise I beg to Inclose you a Copy
of the note I propose to send to Marianne Leigh, which
you will perhaps be so good as to return me (as I have
no other copy from which to write the original) as soon as
possible. I had intended to have made it more severe but
perhaps upon the whole the inclosed will be sufficient —
Until receiving any answer you may make to my last note
I will not trouble you with any further observation. Of
course you will at least on this point (I mean Marianne
Leigh's note) say what you think without reserve and
any course you may propose or any alteration you may
suggest shall on my word and honor be instantly adopted.
Should anything you may say (in returning her note) to
me make me anxious to return any answer, may I have
your permission to forward it to you ?

I find I have proceeded to the end of my note without

even inserting your name. May I ask you to excuse the

omission and to believe that I would gladly have addressed

you in a very, very different way }

Charles Dickens
Miss Maria Beadnell

18BENTINCK Street,
Friday.

[54]

The next letter, to Miss Leigh, is from a
copy in Maria Beadnell's handwriting, for the
original was returned by her to Dickens, in
accordance with his request. The copy was
apparently written on the fly-leaf of the origi-
nal, for on the outside is " Miss Beadnell " in
the handwriting of Dickens. —

Dear Miss Leigh, — I am very happy to avail myself
of the opportunity of inclosing your Album (which I
regret to say want of a moment's time has quite pre-
vented me writing in). To say a very few words relative
to an observation made by you the other day to one of
the Miss Beadnells I believe ; and which has only I regret
to say just reached my ears quite accidentally. I should
not have noticed it at all were it merely an idle gossiping
remark, for one is necessarily compelled to hear so many
of them and they are usually so trifling and so ridiculous
that it w 'd be mere waste of time to notice them in any
way. The remark to which I allude however is one
which if it had the slightest foundation in truth — w'd
so strongly tend to implicate me as a dishonorable bab-
bler, with little heart and less head, that in justice to
myself I cannot refrain from adverting to it — You will
at once perceive I allude to your giving them to under-
stand (if not directly by implication) that I had made you
my confidante, with respect to anything which [may]

have [?] ^ passed between Maria B and myself. Now,

[?]^ passing over any remark which may have been art-

1 The brackets mark torn places in the MS.
[55]

fully elicited from me in any unguarded moment, I can
safely say that 1 never made a confidante of any one. I
am perfectly willing to admit that if I had wished to
secure a confidante in whom candour, secrecy and kind
honorable feeling were indispensable requisites I could
have looked to no one better calculated for this office
than yourself; but still the making you the depositary
of my feelings or secrets, is an honor I never presumed
to expect, and one which I certainly must beg most
positively to decline — A proof of self denial in which
so far as I learn from other avowed confidantes of
yours, I am by no means singular.

I have not hesitated to speak plainly because I feel
most strongly on this subject. The allegation — if it
were not grossly untrue — I again say tending so materi-
ally to inculpate me, and the assertion itself having been
made (so far as I can learn at least, for it has reached me
in a very circuitous manner) certainly not in the most
unaffected or delicate way.

I hope you will understand that in troubling you, I
am not actuated by any absurd idea of self consequence.
I am perfectly aware of my own unimportance, and it is
solely because I am so ; because I w'd much rather mis-
manage my own affairs, than have them ably conducted
by the officious interference of any one, because I do
think that your interposition in this instance, however well-
intentioned, has been productive of as much mischief as
it has been uncalled for ; and because I am really and
sincerely desirous of sparing you the meanness and
humiliation of acting in the petty character of an un-
authorized go-between that I have been induced to write

[56]

this note — for the length of which I beg you will accept
my apology.

I am, Dear Miss Leigh,

Yours &c., Charles Dickens *

To be corresponding again with Maria Bead-
nell, no matter liow unsatisfactorily, was too
much for the self-control of the youth, so he
flings aside all pride and pleads in the follow-
ing letter for reinstatement : —

18 Bentinck Street,
Sunday Morning.

Dear Miss Beadnell. — I am anxious to take the
earliest opportunity of writing to you again, knowing
that the opportunity of addressing you through Kolle —
now my only means of communicating with you — will
shortly be lost, and having your own permission to write
to you — I am most desirous of forwarding a note which
had I received such permission earlier, I can assure you
you would have received 'ere this. Before proceeding to
say a word upon the subject of my present note let me
beg you to believe that your request to see Marianne
Leigh's answer is rendered quite unnecessary by my
previous determination to shew it you, which 1 shall do
immediately on receiving it — that is to say, if 1 receive
any at all. If 1 know anything of her art or disposition
however you are mistaken in supposing that her remarks
will be directed against yourself. / shall be the mark at
which all the anger and spleen will be directed — and I

1 The last three letters are watermarked " 1832."

[57]

shall take it very quietly for whatever she may say I
shall positively decline to enter into any further con-
troversy with her. I shall have no objection to break
a lance, paper or otherwise, with any champion to whom
she may please to entrust her cause but I will have no
futher correspondence or communication with her per-
sonally or in writing. I have copied the note and done
up the parcel which will go off by the first Clapton
Coach to-morrow morning.

And now to the object of my present note. I have
considered and reconsidered the matter, and I have come
to the unqualified determination that I will allow no feel-
ing of pride, no haughty dislike to making a conciliation
to prevent my expressing it without reserve. I will ad-
vert to nothing that has passed ; I will not again seek
to excuse any part I have acted or to justify it by any
course you have ever pursued ; I will revert to nothing
that has ever passed between us, — I will only openly
and at once say that there is nothing 1 have more at
heart, nothing I more sincerely and earnestly desire, than
to be reconciled to you. — It would be useless for me to
repeat here what I have so often said before ; it would
be equally useless to look forward and state my hopes
for the future — all that any one can do to raise himself
by his own exertions and unceasing assiduity I have done,
and will do. I have no guide by which to ascertain your
present feelings and I have, God knows, no means of in-
fluencing them in my favor. I never have loved and I
never can love any human creature breathing but your-
self. We have had many differences, and we have lately
been entirely separated. Absence, however, has not

[58]

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altered my feelings in the slightest degree, and the Love
I now tender you is as pure and as lasting as at any period
of our former correspondence. 1 have now done all 1
can to remove our most unfortunate and to me most
unhappy misunderstanding. The matter now of course
rests solely with you, and you will decide as your own
feelings and wishes direct you. 1 could say much for
myself and I could entreat a favourable consideration on
my own behalf but I purposely abstain from doing so
because it would be only a repetition of an oft told tale
and because I am sure that nothing I could say would
have the effect of influencing your decision in any degree
whatever. Need 1 say that to me it is a matter of vital
import and the most intense anxiety ? — I fear that the
numerous claims which must necessarily be made on your
time and attention next week will prevent your answering
this note within anything like the time which my impa-
tience would name. Let me entreat you to consider your
determination well whatever it be and let me implore you
to communicate it to me as early as possible. — As I am
anxious to convey this note into the City in time to get
it delivered today I will at once conclude by begging you
to believe me,

Yours sincerely, Charles Dickens *

It certainly is difficult to understand Maria
Beadnell's treatment of this ardent youth. She
was interested enough to keep careful copies
of such letters of his as for one reason or

1 Paper watermarked " 1831."
[59]

another she returned ; yet in response to this
last unreservedly loving appeal she answered
him " coldly and reproachfully," ^ and thus they
parted, not to meet again for more than twenty
years.

If the editor is right in thinking that the
reference to the " numerous claims which must
necessarily be made on your time and attention
next week" concerns the wedding of Anne
Beadnell in May, 1833, then the relations with
Maria were not broken off earlier than the
middle of May, 1833. " If youth but knew 1 "
"I never have loved and never can love any
human creature breathing but yourself," the
youth cried in May, 1833, yet in 183^, at most
not over two years later, he became engaged to
Miss Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George
Hogarth, his colleague on the Morning Chroni-
cle, and author of The History of Opera. On
the second of April, I836, he was married.

Indeed, nothing could better demonstrate the
fundamental sanity and normality of Dickens'
apparently somewhat overwrought nature than
his reaction from this intense love affair. Of

• In the later series of letters, Dickens wrote Mrs. Winter on Feb-
ruary 22, 18SS, — " You answered me coldly and reproachfully, and
so I went my way."

[60]

course he suflfered, but ambition re-enforced by
the impulsive energy of youth swiftly pulled
him out of any depths of despair. Wounded
pride bade him cut himself free from the group
in which the painful experience had come to
him. This he seems, wisely, to have done.
The following letter to the father of Maria
Beadnell shows clearly that however much the
young man may have lingered in memory over
his lost love, he cut himself loose from her
circle of friends and saw no more of them till
his success as a writer had established him in
a totally ditferent part of society. While the
letter is friendly enough, it shows that there
could have been no intimate intercourse.

This letter was in reply to an invitation of
Mr. George Beadnell to visit him at his country
place, Myford, Welshpool. —

office of household words,

16 Wellington Street, North-Strand,
Tuesday, fourth May, 1852.1

My dear Sir, — Receiving your note as I was coming
out at my door this morning, I brought it with me down
here to answer. Your handwriting is like a breath of
my hobbledehoyhood and is delightful to encounter.

I am sorry to say that I cannot enjoy the pleasure you

1 This was only three years before the opening of the correspond-
ence with Mrs. Winter.

[61]

propose to me. I should like it very much, but I can
never take any private enjoyment on these occasions.
For what Sir James Graham calls " the reasons of," 1
sketch the following short list of my avocations.

1 am on the stage all day, rehearsing with everybody,
from breakfast until dinner. I preside at all the meals of
the amateur company, and carve all the large joints. We
carry into the country a perfect army of carpenters, gas-
men, tailors, barbers, property-men, dressers and ser-
vants; all of whom have become accustomed to do
everything with the utmost precision and accuracy under
the Managerial eye, but none of whom would do any-
thing right, if that luminary were withdrawn from any
of them for five minutes at a stretch. So 1 am perpetu-
ally hovering among and fluttering these smaller birds ;
at the last minute when the Hall has been filled for weeks,
all sorts of impossible people want all sorts of impossible
places, and have to be given the most urbane explana-
tions. I then settle down for an hour or so before the
rising of the Curtain, to dress, enter upon two parts,
something longer (I should say) than the whole play of
Hamlet — am dressed fourteen times in the course of the
night — and go to bed a little tired.

Add to this, that we start for Birmingham on Tuesday
morning to do all this over again, and act in the Town
Hall two nights running — and 1 leave you to guess what
hope of Wales is in me !

I should like to shake hands with you nevertheless —
I hope 1 may find time for that ! — And if you should
ask for me at the Music Hall on Monday between 11 and
2, you are sure to find me in full — career of botheration.

[62]

Pray give my love to Margaret,^ and ask her to give

the same to Maria if she should see her. (I am exactly

nineteen when I write their names.) Also remember me

kindly to Mr. David Lloyd, and believe me ever, with

ten thousand old recollections,

Faithfully yours,

Charles Dickens
George Beadnell Esq.

What helped Dickens to disentangle himself
was his persistent, vigorous interest in life, — his
insatiable curiosity as to all human experience.
He had, too, as the theatrical program already
printed proves, other friends to turn to, and
new friends were in the making. The theatre
itself unfailingly interested him: he could
never resist a chance at amateur theatricals.
He was rising as a reporter, and, most impor-
tant of all, he began in December, 1833, to
print in the Old Monthly Magazine the first of
his Sketches by Bo{. Nine more were printed in
this magazine before March, 183^. The pseu-
donym " Boz " was first used with the article of
August, 1834. So prompt was his success, that
early in 183 6 he brought together for publica-
tion his Sketches by Bo{, and on the last day
of March, 183 6, issued the first number of his

1 Mrs. Lloyd, Maria's eldest sister.
[63]

Pickwick Papers. A year is a long time at
twenty-one, and, as Mr. Chesterton has clearly
said, the suffering of youth is especially painful
because it has no vision of the alleviation which
time surely brings for any pain : it sees only
the past and the miserable present, — never the
future. Undoubtedly Dickens suffered for a
time; undoubtedly he looked back on these
years later with the deep pity which any ret-
rospect into his youth seemed always to arouse
in him. It is clear, too, from his early writing,
that the people whom he had met in the circle
of the Beadnell family made a deep impression
on him, and that his own sensations in this in-
tercourse left him a large residuum of material
for his novels.

What also must have helped Dickens greatly
at this time was his artist instinct for expres-
sion. He took hints from the Beadnell group
for figures in his SketcbeSy or he frankly put
his memories on paper, of course heighten-
ing the effect a little in most cases because he
looked at what he had seen, if not at what he
had felt, through the medium of his fantastic
humor. For the artist of any sort, conditions,
people, emotions expressed in his proper med-
ium become at once of the past rather than

[64]

the harassing present. The selective presen-
tation which any art necessitates brings a
sense of proportion.

The second of the Sketches by Bo{ published
in January, 18M, has the title, Mrs. Joseph
Porter over the Way. As any Dickens lover
will recall, the mischief-making of Mrs. Porter
causes the complete and ignominious failure
of an amateur performance of Othello. Now
Dickens had in 1833 arranged an amateur
performance of a burlesque of his on Othello,
and the verses of his already printed indicate
that Mrs. John Porter Leigh — who, by the
way, lived not at Clapham as does Mrs.
Porter, but at Clapton — was the same sort
of person. —

Mrs. Leigh a Curry, smart, hot and biting,
Although a dish that is always inviting —

'Bout scandal or spreading reports without heed.

Of course I 'd say nothing, how could I indeed ?

Because if I did I should certainly lie,

And my remarks here doubtless would not apply ;

So as I fear either to praise or to blame,

I will not her faults or her virtues here name.

Certainly the resemblance between the names
of place and person strengthens the suspicion

[65]

roused by the similarity of conditions, that
Mrs. Leigh sat for the portrait of Mrs. Porter.

It looks, too, as if in his sketch, 7be New
Year, Dickens was thinking of the Beadnell
circle. It is reasonably sure that William Moule
suggested the ubiquitous Mr. Tupple.

It is easy to believe that one sees in the early
writings of Dickens other memories and por-
traits from the Beadnell circle, but such identi-
fications are at best dangerous, for Dickens
was skilled in all the novelist's accustomed
mixing of characteristics observed in two dif-
ferent people and of obvious and imagined
qualities. Moreover, his field of observation
steadily widened, so that there may well be
more than one possible original for many of
his figures, even in the early writings.

The memory of those early days in Lombard
Street lingered long after the time of which
I am writing, for there is recollection of Joseph
Moule in the Military Young Gent of Sketches
of Young Gents, and Fanny Moule foreshadows
a well-known figure of David Copperfield.

That Joe Moule, referred to in The Bill of
Fare, sat for the portrait is evident from the
following : —

" The whole heart and soul of the military

[66]

young gentleman are concentrated in hisfavorite
topic. There is nothing that he is so learned
upon as uniforms; he will tell you without
faltering for an instant, what the habiliments
of any one regiment are turned up with, what
regiment wear stripes down the outside and
inside of the leg, and how many buttons the
Tenth had on their coats, he knows to a frac-
tion how many yards and odd inches of gold
lace it takes to make an ensign in the Guards,
is deeply read in the comparative merits of
different bands, and the apparelling of trumpet-
ers and is very luminous indeed in descanting
upon * crack regiments ' and the ' crack ' gentle-
men who compose them, of whose mightiness
and grandeur he is never tired of telling." *

Again the lines in The Bill of Fare relating
to Fanny Moule'^ show where Dickens first
watched the sentimental melancholy which he
later satirized in the Miss Julia Mills of David
Copperfield, and the Miss Mills of Our English
Watering Place.

In David Copperfield, Miss Mills is described
as "that amiable, though quite used-up re-
cluse; that little patriarch of something less
than twenty, who had done with the world

1 See page 36, ante. * See page 35 1 ante.

[67]

and mustn't on any account have the slum-
bering echoes in the caverns of Memory awak-
ened . . . having been unhappy in a misplaced
affection, and being understood to have retired
from the world on her awful stock of experi-
ence, but still to take a calm interest in the
unblighted hopes and loves of youth."

Even out of the very real suffering that was
the youth's for a time, the longing that caused
him to throw aside all wounded pride, to come
from behind his reserves and beg for a renewal
of the old relations, — out of all this developed
the enriched art that searching emotion always
leaves with the artist who has gone through
vital experiences. Even as he ran — with an
unusually intense nature — the gamut of youth-
ful passion, from puzzled scrutiny of the way-
wardness of Maria Beadnell, through wounded
pride, despised love, to passionate devotion
that recked nothing so long as it might serve
the charmer, the human heart in all its moods
of interest, attachment, love, and passion was
revealing itself to him. The emotions and ob-
servations of this early period made possible
the characters of David Copperfield, Pip, Brad-
ley Headstone, and even Toots.

They are quite as much the creations of his

[68]

imagination reacting on these personal experi-
ences as they are the results of close observa-
tion. Indeed, Dickens always wrote from
within out, tempering his realism with a re-
markably original and personal imagination.
It is easy to see in the words of Hexam and
Pip the reflection of the successive moods by
which he passed to the state in which he could
look back on the whole painful experience as
kindly as he does in one of his letters of \SSS.
What drew young Dickens back to Maria
Beadnell, what made him ask for a renewal
of their relations, was the mood he paints in
Headstone's appeal to Lizzie: —

" I have never been quit of you since I first
saw you. Oh, that was a wretched day for
me! That was a wretched, miserable day!
... I have in my way won a station which
is considered worth winning. . . . You draw
me to you. If I were shut up in a strong
prison, you would draw me out. I should
break through the wall to come to you. If I
were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me
up to stagger to you and fall there. . . .

" No man knows, till the time comes, what
depths are within him. To some men it never
comes; let them rest and be thankful! To

[69]

me, you brought it; on me, you forced it;
and the bottom of this raging sea," striking
himself upon the breast, " has been heaved up
ever since. . . . You know what I am going
to say. I love you. What other men may
mean when they use that expression, I cannot
tell ; what / mean is, that I am under the in-
fluence of some tremendous attraction which
I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters
me. You could draw me to fire, you could
draw me to water, you could draw me to the
gallows, you could draw me to any death, you
could draw me to anything I have most avoided,
you could draw me to any exposure and dis-
grace. This and the confusion of my thoughts,
so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean
by your being the ruin of me. But, if you
would return a favourable answer to my offer
of myself in marriage, you could draw me to
any good — every good — with equal force.
My circumstances are quite easy, and you
would want for nothing. My reputation stands
quite high, and would be a shield for yours.
If you saw me at my work, able to do it well
and respected in it, you might even come to
take a sort of pride in me ; — 1 would try hard
that you should. ... I don't know that I

[70]

could say more if I tried. ... I only add that,
if it is any claim on you to be in earnest, I am
in thorough earnest, dreadful earnest."

As time passed, the mood became the quieter
one shown by Pip when Estella says that he
will shortly be able to put her out of his
thoughts : —

" Out of my thoughts 1 You are part of my
existence, part of myself. You have been in
every line I have ever read, since I first came
here, the rough common boy whose poor heart
you wounded even then. You have been in
every prospect I have ever seen since — on the
river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes,
in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in
the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the
streets. You have been the embodiment of
every graceful fancy that my mind has ever
become acquainted with. The stones of which
the strongest London buildings are made, are
not more real, or more impossible to be dis-
placed by your hands, than your presence and
influence have been to me, there and every-
where, and will be. Estella, to the last hour
of my life, you cannot choose but remain part
of my character, part of the little good in me,
part of the evil. But, in this separation, I asso-

[71]

ciate you only with the good, and 1 will faith-
fully hold you to that always, for you must
have done me far more good than harm, let me
feel now what sharp distress I may. Oh,
God bless you, God forgive youl ... All
done, all gone I So much was done and gone,
that when I went out at the gate, the light of
day seemed of a darker colour than when 1
went in."*

Comparing the last passage here with the
letter of February 22, 18^^, in the second set
of letters to be given shortly, one sees fresh
proof of the interplay of experience, imagina-
tion, and memory in the characterization of
Dickens.
Also in the letter of February 1^, 18^^: —
" Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, pas-
sion, aspiration, and determination belong to
me, I have never separated and never shall
separate from the hard-hearted little woman —
you — whom it is nothing to say I would have
died for, with the greatest alacrity! I never
can think and I never seem to observe, that
other young people are in such desperate
earnest or set so much so long upon one
absorbing hope. It is a matter of perfect cer-

1 Great Expectations, Biog. Ed. p. 312.
[72]

tainty to me that I began to fight my way out
of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual
idea of you. This is so fixed in my knowl-
edge that to the hour when I opened your
letter last Friday night, I have never heard
anybody addressed by your name or spoken of
by your name, without a start. The sound of
it has always filled me with a kind of pity and
respect for the deep truth that I had, in my
silly hobbledehoyhood, to bestow upon one
creature who represented the whole world to
me. I have never been so good a man since,
as I was when you made me wretchedly
happy. I shall never be half so good a fellow
again."

Yet, of course Dickens recovered from the
blow, and as youth blessedly does, recovered
rapidly. Nevertheless, as the last quotation
proves, he looked back upon it as the most
significant experience of his life.

The Dickens who came out of this, as it
seemed to him, tragic and blighting affair, was
not at all the lad who had gone into it — a
curious combination of social callowness and
far too sophisticated knowledge of seamier
London, a creature of instincts rather than
of well-understood emotions. He had known

[73]

and intimately shared a comfortable family life
which initiated him into the social humanities.
He had discovered the real man in himself. A
passion intense, yet thoroughly idealistic, had
metamorphosed vague instincts of greatness
into a determination to win for her he loved
all he had dimly dreamed, and this determina-
tion, when he broke off in his outraged pride
the impossibly galling relations, changed to a
grim, half-indignant purpose to prove himself
the man he felt himself to be, — a person by
no means to be played with and scorned, but
to be taken as seriously, — well, as he liked to
take himself.

Nor is it surprising that, as years passed, he
somewhat idealized the whole affair. Lucky
the youth who finds his manhood in an in-
tense emotional experience which stimulates
him to his best accomplishment, which ma-
tures him in knowledge of himself and of the
human heart, without debasement for himself
or others ; which opens to him for his own all
the region of romances for a time his individ-
ual possession, before experience can talk to
him of propinquity, the superman or any
motives lower than the seemingly irresistible
attraction that makes him ready to believe all

[74]

that is good of one person and ready to do all
that is brave for her. Young love like that no
man forgets wholly, whether or not it result
in winning the woman loved. So sentimental
a man as Dickens could not possibly forget it.
He must cherish it, linger over it, and, as the
great idealizer of the supposedly common-
place, must idealize it too. Moreover, as the
years passed, he must have seen as any sane
person would, that youth is not so wise as it
thinks itself. He must have felt that all the
details of this love affair had not been as
perfectly conducted by him as he had once
thought, and that possibly a somewhat differ-
ent behavior on his part might have brought
a more satisfactory ending. At any rate, such
judicial inquiry as to one's past conduct is the
beginning of tolerance for the person previ-
ously held to be entirely in the wrong.

Finally, though Dickens was at first happy
enough in his marriage, it was not many years
before he was feeling a sense of " one happi-
ness I have missed in my life, and one friend
and companion I have never made," as he
phrased it in a letter to Forster. Naturally,
his thoughts turned to the " might-have-been,"
which presented itself none the less attractively

[75]

because seen through the coloring lens of imag-
ination as contrasted with the white light of his
harassing marital experience. Consequently,
when writing David Copperfield, that book
which is in large part but the playing of a
richly fertile imagination about biographical
incident and experience, he told in David's
love for Dora his own passion of twenty years
before for Maria Beadnell. It will be remem-
bered that the novel grew out of a futile at-
tempt of Dickens to write his autobiography.
When he came to the period in his early man-
hood to which his infatuation for Maria Bead-
nell belonged, he " lost courage and burned the
rest." The semi-autobiographic nature of the
book was largely responsible for his intense
pleasure in writing it. He said to Mrs. Watson,
September 24, 18^0: —

" There are some things in the next Copper-
field that I think better than any that have
gone before. After I have been believing such
things with all my heart and soul two results
always ensue ; first, I can't write plainly to the
eye ; secondly, I can't write sensibly to the
mind."

To Forster he wrote thus, on October 21 : ** I
am within three pages of the shore ; and am

[76]

strangely divided, as usual in such cases, be-
tween sorrow and joy. Oh, my dear Forster, if
I were to say half of what Copperfield makes
me feel to-night, how strangely, even to you,
I should be turned inside out I I seem to be
sending some part of myself into the Shadowy
World."

The intense reality of the book for Dickens
is revealed in his original preface : —

" I do not fmd it easy to get sufficiently far
away from this Book, in the first sensations of
having finished it, to refer to it with the com-
posure which this formal heading would seem
to require. My interest in it, is so recent and
strong ; and my mind is so divided between
pleasure and regret — pleasure in the achieve-
ment of a long design, regret in the separa-
tion from many companions — that I am in
danger of wearying the reader whom I love,
with personal confidences and private emo-
tions. . . .

" It would concern the reader little, perhaps,
to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid down
at the close of a two years' imaginative task ;
or how an Author feels as if he were dismiss-
ing some portion of himself into the shadowy
world, when a crowd of the creatures of his

[77]

brain are going from him for ever. Yet, I
have nothing else to tell ; unless, indeed, 1 were
to confess (which might be of less moment
still) that no one can ever believe this Narra-
tive, in the reading, more than I have believed
it in the writing." **0f all my books, I like
this the best. It will be easily believed that
I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy,
and that no one can ever love that family as
dearly as I love them. But, like many fond
parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite
child. And his name is David Copperfield."

That David and Dora marry and that Dora
dies militate in no way against the declaration
of Forster, and Dickens' own repeated asser-
tions, that Dora sprang from an original in his
own experience. The changes are but those
of the trained story-teller properly regardful
both of the eternal unwillingness of the pub-
lic to part any sooner than is absolutely nec-
essary with the characters it has come to feel
interested in, and his own purposes in tracing
the development of his hero, David. How un-
willingly he yielded to the imperative demands
of his underlying purpose in the story is shown
by the following: Forster says, "His principal
hesitation occurred in connection with the

[78]

child-wife Dora, who had become a great fa-
vorite as he went on." On the seventh of May
Dickens wrote: "Still undecided about Dora,
but must decide today " ; yet on the twentieth
of the following August he could add : ** I
have been very hard at work these three days,
and have still Dora to kill. But with good
luck I may do it tomorrow."

An experience which gave Dickens several
figures in his early sketches, and suggested
others, like Miss Mills ; which opened to him
a complete understanding of the passionate
moods of Headstone, Pip, and David, and gave
him a large part of his material for David
Copperfield itself ; which, in brief, as man and
as writer, matured and developed him greatly,
is worthy to be recorded. The personality of
Dickens as it shows itself in these early let-
ters and verses is, moreover, such as greatly
to increase the interest of this record.

There are, however, even in the novels of
Dickens himself, few more dramatic coinci-
dences than this love story offers. It sounds
like one of the author's own imaginings ; that
twenty-two years after his parting with Miss
Beadnell a letter should one day open afresh,
for both Dickens and Miss Beadnell his long

[79]

hidden romance. She had married, February
2S, 184^, Henry Louis Winter, a business
man in comfortable circumstances at the time of
this renewing of the correspondence. Dickens,
married then for some nineteen years and the
father of a family of nine, had already won a
high position in the literary world. The letter
in question chanced, dramatically enough, to
reach him just when his mind was full of the
memories that any re-reading by him of David
Copperfield must arouse. On Jan. 29, 18^^, he
wrote to his friend, Arthur Ryland: "I have
been poring over 'Copperfield' (which is my
favourite) with the idea of getting a reading
out of it, to be called by some such name as
'Young Housekeeping and Little Emily.' " The
words of the answer of Dickens to Mrs. Win-
ter's first letter may best describe the renewal
of the correspondence. —

Tavistock House,
Saturday, Tenth February, 1855-

My dear Mrs. Winter, — I constantly receive hun-
dreds of letters in great varieties of writing, all perfectly
strange to me, and (as you may suppose) have no
particular interest in the faces of such general epistles.
As I was reading by my fire last night, a handful of
notes was laid down on my table. I looked them over,

[80]

DORA SPENLOW and DAVID COPPERFIELD

(MARIA BEADNELLL and CHARLES DICKENS)

Etching by W. H. W. Bicknell, after painting
by J. A. ^Af^ILLIAMS, specially for The Bibliophile
Society. The central figure is from Mr. Bicknell' s
own sketch of ** Dora."

mil

Qwiard^iaqqoo uivau one wojwas8 ahou

ianaxoiG dajMAHO fane jjjaviaAaa AiHAr/i)

anitnisq/iaJlB .JJaviHDia .W .H .\/V yd gnirioja
•jfrrfqoiidia sriT lot yllBioaqa ,8MAlJaiW .A .J^ yd

rpivp h!in

vli Oil

'"«'.k,

■■k«.» ,

Jaw, Hi, :. s

» » » >

> 3 > > J > 9

Jo -^^itot hC*>.- cCp-

•X t-t.-**V.^i.-vo^ t^CCKtJt.it^

■;iC crdif/ /i*rvvdv'

DAVID COPPERFIELD.

and, recognizing the writing of no private friend, let
them lie there, and went back to my book. But I found
my mind curiously disturbed, and wandering away
through so many years to such early times of my life,
that I was quite perplexed to account for it. There was
nothing in what I had been reading, or immediately
thinking about, to awaken such a train of thought, and
at last it came into my head that it must have been sug-
gested by something in the look of one of those letters.
So I turned them over again, — and suddenly the re-
membrance of your hand came upon me with an influ-
ence that I cannot express to you. Three or four and
twenty years vanished like a dream, and I opened it with
the touch of my young friend David Copperfield when
he was in love. —

There was something so busy and so pleasant in your
letter — so true and cheerful and frank and affectionate
— that I read on with perfect delight until I came to
your mention of your two little girls. In the unsettled
state of my thoughts, the existence of these dear children
appeared such a prodigious phenomenon, that I was in-
clined to suspect myself of being out of my mind, until it
occurred to me that perhaps I had nine children of my
own ! Then the three or four and twenty years began
to rearrange themselves in a long procession between me
and the changeless Past, and 1 could not help considering
what strange stuff all our little stories are made of.

Believe me, you cannot more tenderly remember our
old days and our old friends than 1 do. 1 hardly ever
go into the City but I walk up an odd little court at the
back of the Mansion House and come out by the comer

181]

of Lombard Street.^ Hundreds of times as 1 have passed
the church there — on my way to and from the Sea, the
Continent, and where not — I invariably associate it with
somebody (God knows who) having told me that poor
Anne ' was buried there. If you would like to examine
me in the name of a good-looking Cornish servant you
used to have (1 suppose she has twenty-nine great grand-
children now, and walks with a stick), you will find my
knowledge on the point correct, though it was a mon-
strous name too. I forget nothing of those times. They
are just as still and plain and clear as if I had never been
in a crowd since, and had never seen or heard my own
name out of my own house. What should I be worth,
or what would labour and success be worth, if it were
otherwise !

Your letter is more touching to me from its good
and gentle association with the state of Spring in which
I was either much more wise or much more foolish than
I am now — I never know which to think it — than I
could tell you if I tried for a week. I will not try at all.
I heartily respond to it, and shall be charmed to have a
long talk with you, and most cordially glad to see you
after all this length of time.

I am going to Paris to-morrow morning, but I pur-
pose being back within a fortnight. When 1 return, Mrs.
Dickens will come to you, to arrange a day for our see-
ing you and Mr. Winter (to whom I beg to be remem-
bered) quietly to dinner. We will have no intruder or
foreign creature on any pretence whatever, in order that

^ One of their old trysting places.

* Her sister; she married the early friend of Dickens, Henry
KuUe.

[82]

we may set in without any restraint for a tremendous
gossip.

Mary Ann Leigh ^ we saw at Broadstairs about fifty
years ago. Mrs. Dickens and her sister, who read all
the marriages in all the papers, shrieked to me when
the announcement of hers appeared, what did I think
of that? I calmly replied that I thought it was
time. I should have been more excited if I had
known of the old gentleman with several thousand a
year, uncountable grown-up children, and no English
grammar.

My mother has a strong objection to being considered
in the least old, and usually appears here on Christmas
Day in a juvenile cap,^ which takes an immense time in
the putting on. The Fates seem to have made up their
minds that I shall never see your Father when he comes
this way. David Lloyd is altogether an impostor — not
having in the least changed (that I could make out when I
saw him at the London Tavern) since what I suppose to
have been the year 1 770, when I found you three ' on
Cornhill, with your poor mother, going to St. Mary Axe
to order mysterious dresses — which afterwards turned
out to be wedding garments. That was in the remote
period when you all wore green cloaks, cut (in my re-
membrance) very round, and which I am resolved to be-

1 Married, Nov. 14, 1854, to Mr. William Back.

2 This confirms the popular supposition that Mrs. Dickens was
the original of Mrs, Nickleby; her juvenile airs and fondness
for her caps are specially noted in the novel.

* Apparently Margaret, Anne and Maria Beadnell, going to ar-
range for dresses for the wedding of Margaret with David Lloyd.
It took place April 20, l83i.

[83]

lieve were made of Merino. I escorted you with native
gallantry to the Dress Maker's door, and your mother,
seized with an apprehension — groundless upon my
honor — that I might come in, said emphatically: "And
now Mr. Dickin " — which she always used to call me
— " we '11 wish^'OM good morning."

When I was writing the word Paris ^ just now, I re-
membered that my existence was once entirely uprooted
and my whole Being blighted by the Angel of my soul
being sent there to finish her education ! If I can dis-
charge any little commission for you, or bring home
anything for the darlings, whom I cannot yet believe to
be anything but a delusion of yours, pray employ me.
I shall be at the H6tel Meurice — locked up when within,
as my only defence against my country and the United
States — but a most punctual and reliable functionary if
you will give me any employment.

My Dear Mrs. Winter, I have been much moved by
your letter ; and the pleasure it has given me has some
little sorrowful ingredient in it. In the strife and struggle
of this great world where most of us lose each other so
strangely, it is impossible to be spoken to out of the old
times without a softened emotion. You so belong to the
days when the qualities that have done me most good
since, were growing in my boyish heart that I cannot
end my answer to you lightly. The associations my
memory has with you make your letter more — I want
a word — invest it with a more immediate address to
me than such a letter could have from anybody else.
Mr. Winter will not mind that. We are all sailing away

1 " Dora " was sent to Paris to finish her education.
[84]

to the sea, and have a pleasure in thinking of the river
we are upon, when it was very narrow and little.
Faithfully your friend,

Charles Dickens

This is, of course, only the cordial letter of a
man who, when a figure from the past emerges
unexpectedly, — a figure that once had done
much to develop in him the qualities which
had done him "most good since," — was
pleased and even deeply touched at the inter-
est shown after the lapse of years. This voice
from the past aroused within him a train of
long cherished memories ; and when one con-
siders the intensity of his feelings on this mat-
ter, and the vividness of his recollections, it is
easy to imagine that the re-opening of the cor-
respondence was productive of many thrilling
sensations.

The next letter from Mrs. Winter was evi-
dently more intimate in tone. How could it
fail to be? A very famous man, once her lover,
had not only told her in friendliest fashion how
much she had once meant to him, but — far
subtler compliment — had shown a remarkable
memory for small details of their former asso-
ciation. Her second letter brings a reply which
must have gratified her keenly; a reply, in

[85]

its detailed statement of the influence of this
long past love affair on his life and on David
Copperfield in particular, which makes the
letter of the utmost importance to the student
of Dickens. —

H6tel Meurice, Paris,
Thursday, Fifteenth February, 185S.

My dear Mrs. Winter,— (I had half a mind, when
1 dipped my pen in the ink, to address you by your old
natural Christian name.)

The snow lies so deep on the Northern Railway, and
the Posts have been so interrupted in consequence, that
your charming note arrived here only this morning. I
reply by return of post — with a general idea that Sarah ^
will come to Finsbury Place with a basket and a face of
good-humoured compassion, and carry the letter away,
and leave me as desolate as she used to do.

I got the heartache again when I read your commis-
sion, written in the hand which I find now to be not in
the least changed, and yet it is a great pleasure to be
entrusted with it, and to have that share in your gentler
remembrances which 1 cannot find it still my privilege to
have without a stirring of the old fancies. I need not
tell you that it shall be executed to the letter — with as
much interest as I once matched a little pair of gloves for
you which I recollect were blue ones. (I wonder whether
people generally wore blue gloves when I was nineteen,
or whether it was only you !) I am very, very sorry

1 Evidently the Cornish servant, spoken of in the last letter.
Mrs. Winter lived in Finsbury Square.

[86]

you mistrusted me in not writing before your little girl
was bom ; but I hope now you know me better you will
teach her, one day, to tell her children, in times to come
when they may have some interest in wondering about
it, that I loved her mother with the most extraordinary
earnestness when I was a boy.

I have always believed since, and always shall to the
last, that there never was such a faithful and devoted
poor fellow as I was. Whatever of fancy, romance,
energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to
me, 1 never have separated and never shall separate from
the hard-hearted little woman — you — whom it is noth-
ing to say I would have died for, with the greatest
alacrity ! I never can think, and 1 never seem to observe,
that other young people are in such desperate earnest or
set so much, so long, upon one absorbing hope. It is a
matter of perfect certainty to me that 1 began to fight
my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one per-
petual idea of you. This is so fixed in my knowledge
that to the hour when I opened your letter last Friday
night, I have never heard anybody addressed by your
name, or spoken of by your name, without a start. The
sound of it has always filled me with a kind of pity and
respect for the deep truth that 1 had, in my silly hobble -
dehoyhood, to bestow upon one creature who repre-
sented the whole world to me. I have never been so
good a man since, as 1 was when you made me wretchedly
happy. 1 shall never be half so good a fellow any more.

This is all so strange now both to think of, and to say,
after every change that has come about ; but 1 think,
when you ask me to write to you, you are not unpre-

[S7]

pared for what it is so natural to me to recall, and will
not be displeased to read it. 1 fancy, — though you
may not have thought in the old time how manfully I
loved you — that you may have seen in one of my books
a faithful reflection of the passion 1 had for you, and
may have thought that it was something to have been
loved so well, and may have seen in little bits of " Dora "
touches of your old self sometimes, and a grace here and
there that may be revived in your little girls, years hence,
for the bewilderment of some other young lover —
though he will never be as terribly in earnest as I and
David Copperfleld were. People used to say to me how
pretty all that was, and how fanciful it was, and how
elevated it was above the little foolish loves of very
young men and women. But they little thought what
reason I had to know it was true and nothing more nor
less.

These are things that I have locked up in my own
breast, and that 1 never thought to bring out any more.
But when 1 find myself writing to you again " all to
yourself," how can 1 forbear to let as much light in upon
them as will shew you that they are there still ! If the
most innocent, the most ardent, and the most disinter-
ested days of my life had you for their Sun — as indeed
they had — and if 1 know that the Dream I lived in did
me good, refined my heart, and made me patient and
persevering, and if the Dream were all of you — as God
knows it was — how can 1 receive a confidence from you,
and return it, and make a feint of blotting all this out !

As I have said, 1 fancy that you know all about it
quite as well as I do, however. I have a strong belief

[88]

— there is no harm in adding hope to that — that per-
haps you have once or twice laid down that book, and
thought, " How dearly that boy must have loved me,
and how vividly this man remembers it ! "

I shall be here until Tuesday or Wednesday. If the
snow allows this letter to come to you in the meantime,
perhaps it would allow one to come to me, " all to my-
self," if you were to try it. A number of recollections
came into my head when I began, and 1 meant to have
gone through a string of them and to have asked you if
they lived in your mind too. But they all belong to the
one I have indulged in — half pleasantly, half painfully

— and are all swallowed up in that, so let them go.

My dear Mrs. Winter,

Ever affectionately yours,
Charles Dickens
[P. S.] I wonder what has become of a bundle of let-
ters I sent you back once (according to order) tied with
a blue ribbon, of the color of the gloves !

This second letter, full of sentiment and
tender recollections of the past, must have
read for Mrs. Winter very much like a love
letter. She has spoken of having a letter " all
to myself," and he writes frankly, movedly, as
he recalls the past, closing with a request for
an answer ** all to myself." Surely this seems
like dangerous ground and drifting rapidly
away from the region of calm, common-sense
middle-age. Yet it is easy to see how all this

[89]

could have been written without any intention
of bringing as warm a reply as it doubtless
called forth.

Full of memories of his youth from a recent
re-reading of David Copperfield, Dickens is
suddenly confronted by a figure out of this
very past. The figure speaks to him in words
of unmistakable interest and kindliness. What
wonder, with the pleasant reverses Time has
brought in their relative positions clearly be-
fore him, that he should fall to mulling over
even the smallest details of that early associa-
tion ! What wonder, when his persistent atti-
tude of keenest pity toward his youth and his
skill as a narrator are remembered, that the
letter which flows from his pen as he thinks
should seem to the recipient almost a new
declaration of abiding affection 1 As the man
of family and wide literary reputation, hedged
in by all the social barriers, he writes to a
woman supposedly well settled in life, and
happy. His pen runs away with him, and,
presto, he has written something very like a
love letter, when it was meant only for as defi-
nite as possible a picture of the emotions of
the past. To Mrs. Winter those words about a
letter " all to myself " were fairly and squarely

[90]

an invitation to answer him as frankly. It
is not surprising that her reply told for the
first time her view of her conduct at the date
of the painful breaking off between them.

The words of the next letter of Dickens, —
" How it all happened as it did, we shall never
know on this side of Time ; but if you had
ever told me then what you tell me now, I
know myself well enough to be thoroughly
assured that the simple truth and energy which
were in my love would have overcome every-
thing," bear out the editor's earlier surmise
that Maria Beadnell's parents had regarded
Dickens as by no means a desirable suitor on
account of his poverty, family troubles, and
impulsiveness. There is support for this the-
ory, too, in the words, " I have never blamed
you at all, but I have believed until now that
you never had the stake in that serious game
which 1 had."

Had the last letter of Mrs. Winter given him
permission to use her Christian name, as in
his preceding letter he had thought of doing ?
The exuberance of emotion and the intimacy
of this letter — the last before his disenchant-
ment— are perhaps unparalleled in anything
that ever fell from his pen: —

[91]

Tavistock House,
Thursday, Twenty-second February, 1855.

My dear Maria, — The old writing is so plain to me^
that 1 have read your letter with great ease (though it is
just a little crossed) , and have not lost a word of it. 1
was obliged to leave Paris on Tuesday morning before the
Post came in ; but I took such precautions to prevent
the possibility of any mischance, that the letter came
close behind me. I arrived at home last night, and it
followed me this morning. No one but myself has the
slightest knowledge of my correspondence, I may add, in
this place. I could be nowhere addressed with stricter
privacy or in more absolute confidence than at my own
house.

Ah ! Though it is so late to read in the old hand what
I never read before, I have read it with great emotion,
and with the old tenderness softened to a more sorrowful
remembrance than I could easily tell you. How it all
happened as it did, we shall never know on this side of
Time ; but if you had ever told me then what you tell
me now, I know myself well enough to be thoroughly
assured that the simple truth and energy which were in
my love would have overcome everything. I remember
well that long after I came of age — 1 say long ; well ! It
seemed long then ^ — I wrote to you for the last time of
all, with a dawn upon me of some sensible idea that
we were changing into man and woman, saying would
you forget our little differences and separations and let
us begin again ? You answered me very coldly and
reproachfully, — and so I went my way.

1 As the letter given on pp. 57-59 shows, it was three months after
he became of age.

[92]

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But nobody can ever know with what a sad heart I
resigned you, or after what struggles and what a conflict.
My entire devotion to you, and the wasted tenderness of
those hard years which I have ever since half loved, half
dreaded to recall, made so deep an impression on me
that I refer to it a habit of suppression which now be-
longs to me, which I know is no part of my original
nature, but which makes me chary of showing my affec-
tions, even to my children, except when they are very
young. A few years ago (just before Copperfield) 1 began
to write my life, intending the manuscript to be found
among my papers when its subject should be concluded.
But as I began to approach within sight of that part of
it, I lost courage and burned the rest. I have never
blamed you at alV but I have believed until now that
you never had the stake in that serious game which I
had.

All this mist passes away upon your earnest words ;
and when I find myself to have been in your mind at
that thoughtful crisis in your life which you so unaf-
fectedly and feelingly describe, I am quite subdued and
strangely enlightened. When poor Fanny '^ died (I think
she always knew that I never could bear to hear of you
as of any common person) we were out of town, and I
never heard of your having been in Devonshire Terrace

1 Compare this with the following passage in Little Dorrit, — the
dialogue between Arthur Clennam and Flora Pinching : " I can't,
Arthur," returned Flora, " be denounced as heartless . . . without
setting myself right," etc. " My dear Mrs. Finching, you were
not to blame, and I have never blamed you. We were both too
young, too dependent and helpless to do anything but accept our
separation."

^ His sister, who died in 1848.

[93]

— least of all in my room ! I never heard of you in asso-
ciation with that time until I read your letter to-day. I
could not, however, — really could not — at any time
within these nineteen years, have been so unmindful of
my old truth, and have so set my old passion aside, as to
talk to you like a person in any ordinary relation towards
me. And this I think is the main reason on my side why
the few opportunities that there have been of our seeing
one another again have died out.

All this again you have changed and set right — at
once so courageously, so delicately and gently, that you
open the way to a confidence between us which still once
more, in perfect innocence and good faith, may be be-
tween ourselves alone. All that you propose, I accept
with my whole heart. Whom can you ever trust if it be
not your old lover ! Lady Olliflfe asked me in Paris the
other day (we are, in our way, confidential you must
know) whether it was really true that I used to love
Maria Beadnell so very, very, very much ? I told her
that there was no woman in the world, and there were
very few men, who could ever imagine how much.

You are always the same in my remembrance. When
you say you are " toothless, fat, old, and ugly " (which I
don't believe), I fly away to the house in Lombard
Street, which is pulled down, as if it were necessary that
the very bricks and mortar should go the way of my airy
castles, and see you in a sort of raspberry colored dress
with a little black trimming at the top — black velvet it
seems to be made of — cut into Vandykes — an immense
number of Vandykes — with my boyish heart pinned like
a captured butterfly on every one of them. I have never

[ 94 ]

MARIA BEADNELL WINTER

(The original of Dora in David Copperfield,
and of Flora in LITTLE Dorrit).

Born, 1811 ; died, September 30, 1886.

Engraved by J. A. J. \A^lLCOX, from a daguerre-
otype taken, perhaps, between 1855 and i860.

:r heard f^^ '^''"' >•■
i^ your i
illy could not — it any time
s, have been so unmindful of
so set my old passion aside, as to
1 in any ordinary Is

s the main reason on wiiy

at there have been ot uu* ^.eeing
/vv died out.

uu have rhnnrred and set rig^ht — at
on '. ?o H y and gently, that you

op :e between us which still once

tr and good faith, may be be-

tW' \e. A you propose, I accept

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aw much.

.which I

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way of my airy

..ly colored dress

op — black velvet it

set ; J Vandykes — an immense

ni: ;h my boyish h

a capturt. -y one of t^ t

0. A

seen a girl play the harp, from that day to this, but my
attention has been instantly arrested, and that drawing
room has stood before me so plainly that 1 could write
a most accurate description of it. I remember that there
used to be a tendency in your eyebrows to join together ;
and sometimes in the most unlikely places — in Scotland,
America, Italy — on the stateliest occasions and the most
unceremonious — • when 1 have been talking to a strange
face and have observed even such a slight association as
this in it, I have suddenly been carried away at the rate
of a thousand miles a second, and have thought " Maria
Beadnell 1 " ^ When we were falling off from each other,
I came from the House of Commons many a night at
two or three o'clock in the morning, only to wander past
the place you were asleep in. And I have gone over that
ground within these twelve months,^ hoping it was not
ungrateful to consider whether any reputation the world
can bestow is repayment to a man for the loss of such a
vision of his youth as mine. You ask me to treasure
what you tell me, in my heart of hearts. O see what
I have cherished there, through all this time and all these
changes !

In the course of Saturday I will write to you at Artil-
lery Place, sending the little brooches and telling you
when Catherine will come — not forgetting the little niece,

1 Dickens uses this tendency of his in Little Dorrit, where Cien-
nam says : " Little more than a week ago, at Marseilles, the face of
the pretty girl from whom he had parted with regret had had an
unusual interest for him, and a tender hold upon him, because of
some resemblance, real or imagined, to this first face that had soared
out of his gloomy life into the bright glories of fancy."

2 When writing Hard Times.

[95]

though I don't expect her to remind me of Somebody or
Anybody. And now to what I have reserved for the
last.

1 am a dangerous man to be seen with, for so many
people know me. At St. Paul's, the Dean and the whole
chapter know me. In Paternoster Row of all places,^
the very tiles and chimney pots know me. At first, I a
little hesitated whether or no to advise you to forego
that interview or suggest another — principally because
what would be very natural and probable a fortnight
hence,^ seems scarcely so probable now. Still I should
very much like to see you before we meet when others
are by — I feel it, as it were, so necessary to our being at
ease — and unless I hear from you to the contrary, you
may expect to encounter a stranger whom you may sus-
pect to be the right person if he wears a moustache.
You would not like better to call here on Sunday, asking
first for Catherine and then for me ? It is almost a posi-
tive certainty that there will be no one here but I, between
3 and 4. I make this suggestion, knowing what odd
coincidences take place in streets when they are not
wanted to happen ; though I know them to be so unlikely,
that I should not think of such a thing if any one but
you were concerned. If you think you would not like
to come here, make no change. I will come there.

I cannot trust myself to begin afresh, or I should have
my remembrances of our separation, and think yours
hard to me. I remember poor Anne writing to me once
(in answer to some burst of low-spirited madness of

1 Because of his connection as reporter with Doctors' Commons.
» After Mrs. Dickens had called and the Winters had dined with
Dickens and his wife.

[96]

rl^if^'

• •• •

mine), and saying " My dear Charles, I really cannot
understand Maria, or venture to take the responsibility of
saying what the state of her affections is" — and she
added, I recollect, God bless her, a long quotation about
Patience and Time. Well, well ! It was not to be until
Patience and Time should bring us round together thus.
Remember, I accept all with my whole soul, and recip-
rocate all.

Ever your affectionate friend,

Charles Dickens

Some of Maria Beadnell's old coquetry was
in that missing letter, plainly, for though she
writes of herself as "toothless, fat, old, and
ugly," she asks for an interview, unattractive
and disillusionizing as she would be if her
words were true. But her portrait shows that
she was not what she describes, only at the
worst — except to the eye that looked at her
through the kindly lens of memory — undis-
tinguishable from thousands of other women
of the day.

The step of Dickens from wisdom in ask-
ing for a letter all to himself had led to far
greater unwisdom on the part of Mrs. Winter.
In her new request Dickens should have felt his
warning, for it was foolishly romantic. He
did recognize that for them to meet by them-
selves after the Winters had been entertained

[97]

at his house, and new relations established,
would seem more natural and fortuitous, but
sentiment owned him too. The old friend-
ship glows into rather surprisingly strong
flame in those final words, " Remember, I ac-
cept all with my whole soul, and reciprocate
all." On the other hand, there must have
been for Dickens a keen satisfaction, even de-
light, in the situation. Here was Maria Bead-
nell, who, in playing fast and loose with him,
had given him the bitterest experience of his
life, now, after twenty years, explaining away
her past conduct, and pressing her friendship
and even her affection upon him.

Whether rightly or wrongly, Dickens was
increasingly unhappy in his married life, and
now suddenly a dream, for years regarded as
only what might have been, seemed to give
promise of changing into the most cordial, the
most comprehending of friendships. Satisfied
vanity, curiosity, sentiment, even a persistent
craving for a companionship he did not find
in his home, urged him to the interview. But
like Bluebeard's wife, he met with a shock of
the severest kind. Certainly he did not find
that, as one of our English dramatists has de-
clared, the future is but the past entered

[98]

through another door. His disillusionment
was dramatic and complete.

After the intensity of the preceding letter,
that which immediately follows, friendly as it
is, sounds chilling. Probably, as it is dated
but two days after the other, its tone is due
only to the fact that, as it accompanied gifts,
it might well fall under other eyes than those
of Mrs. Winter. —

Tavistock House,
Saturday, Twenty-fourth February, 185S.

My dear Mrs. Winter, — l have had fearful sus-
picions on my way home from Paris, that those little bits
of velvet which are worn round the neck ought to fasten
with a sort of clasp ; but the disinterested merchant with
whom I executed your commission, assured me that the
little ornaments I enclose were the right things, and would
adjust such bits of velvet, ** of a manner very ravishing."
He was so rapturous in the expression 1 translate, — so
excessively voluble on the subject, and so injured in his
honor by my harboring the least doubt, that I meekly
submitted to him.

So here they are, right or wrong. The smaller one
with the blue stones, I designed for your little girl ; the
other for yourself. You must let me give them to you.
They are of no worth, except as a remembrance.

I should have brought your baby a toy, but that the
only packable toys I saw were all hideous saucer-eyed
creatures bursting out of boxes — and dreadful old men
and women with inflamed noses.

[99]

Catherine proposes to come to you on Tuesday at be-
tween half past two and three, when a day must be
arranged for you and Mr. Winter's dining with us. And
while I think of it, pray let me expressly stipulate for
your bringing Margaret's^ daughter with you. What
you say of her makes me wish to see her very much,
and 1 should venture to send my love to her by name, if I
could make out whether you call her ; Pebby — or Pebbly
— or Mebby — or Webbly. Being quite unable to settle
this point to my satisfaction (though you write with such
astonishing plainness), I send my love to her as your
niece and her mother's child.

Believe me ever,

Very faithfully yours,
Charles Dickens

Compare the foregoing letter with the pas-
sage in Little Dorrit developed from this
incident : —

Arrived at Paris, and resting there three days, Mr.
Dorrit strolled much about the streets alone, looking
in at the shop-windows, and particularly the jewellers'
windows. Ultimately, he went into the most famous
jeweller's, and said he wanted to buy a little gift for
a lady.

It was a charming little woman to whom he said it —
a sprightly little woman, dressed in perfect taste, who
came out of a green velvet bower to attend upon him,
from posting up some dainty little books of account
which one could hardly suppose to be ruled for the entry

1 Mrs. David Lloyd's daughter.
[ 100]

of any articles more commercial than kisses, at a dainty
little shining desk, which looked in itself like a sweetmeat.

For example, then, said the little woman, what species
of gift did monsieur desire ? A love gift ?

Mr. Dorrit smiled, and said. Eh, well! Perhaps.
What did he know? It was always possible; the sex
being so charming. Would she show him some ?

Most willingly, said the little woman. Flattered and
enchanted to show him many. But pardon ! To begin
with, he would have the great goodness to observe that
there were love gifts, and there were nuptial gifts. For
example, these ravishing ear-rings, and this necklace so
superb to correspond, were what one called a love gift.
These brooches and these rings, of a beauty so gracious
and celestial, were what one called, with the permission
of monsieur, nuptial gifts.

Perhaps it would be a good arrangement, Mr. Dorrit
hinted, smiling, to purchase both, and to present the love
gift first, and to finish with the nuptial offering ?

Ah Heaven ! said the little woman, laying the tips of
the fingers of her two little hands against each other, that
would be generous indeed, that would be a special gal-
lantry! And without doubt the lady so crushed with
gifts would find them irresistible.

Mr. Dorrit was not sure of that. But, for example, the
sprightly little woman was very sure of it, she said. So
Mr. Dorrit bought a gift of each sort, and paid hand-
somely for it.

Did Dickens and Mrs. Winter meet as he
suggested, or did she see the wisdom of his

[101 ]

suggestion, in his letter of February 22, and
wait till the two couples dined together ? In
any case, there was keen and sudden disillu-
sionment on his part, for the next letter of the
series, written about a fortnight after the last
one printed, shows not the eager affectionate-
ness of the letter from Paris ; not even a man
ready for an interview with his correspondent,
but rather one who was more than willing to
avoid a meeting. Could contrast in tone be
sharper than between the letters of February
twenty-second and March tenth ? —

Tavistock House,
Saturday Morning, Tenth March, 185S.

My dear Maria, — Your letter was delivered here
yesterday evening at half past seven. Being out, I did
not receive it until I returned home at midnight. This
answer is necessarily very short, for I have a fear that it
may not reach you otherwise.

I think we are pretty sure to be at home before three
tomorrow. I cannot positively speak for myself, as I
am one of a committee on some public literary business,
which may have to make an official representation some
time tomorrow. I have undertaken to say what is nec-
essary to be said, whenever the interview comes off ; and
it is not impossible (the matter pressing), that Sunday
may be profaned for the purpose. I do not think it is
very likely, however.

Your cold is a very well-disposed one, to improve in

[102]

such weather, and it has my warmest commendation for
being so good. I am so busy that I have not had time
to consider whether I took it by sympathy on Wednes-
day evening — but I think I heard somebody sneezing
at my desk half the day yesterday, who sounded Uke
the incomparable author.

You make me smile when you picture to yourself how
weak I might be, and what poor thoughts I might have,
and in what unworthy lights it might be my spoiled na-
ture to shew myself. With faults enough to answer for, I
believe I have never been that kind of person for a day.

Little Ella shall hear from me on Monday.

In the ghostly unrest of going to begin a new book,^
my time is like one of the Spirits in Macbeth, and " will
not be commanded " — even by me.

You may be perfectly sure that in writing to me, you
write to no one else.

Ever affectionately yours, C. D.

The fourth paragraph of the foregoing letter
probably reveals in part the cause of the
change. The tables were completely turned.
Twenty years before, the youth had been
played with, heartlessly, as it then seemed to
him ; for nothing he could do or say made the
girl, Maria Beadnell, less obdurate in her wilful
unresponsiveness. Now Dickens, ready to
found on the old relations an intimately sym-
pathetic friendship, was repelled by a coquetry

1 This was Little Dorrit ; the first number appeared in December
of the same year.

[103]

that tried persistently to give a sentimental
significance to the commonplaces of every-day
intercourse.

What a vengeance time had brought 1 Dora
had become Flora in Little Dorrit. There can
be no doubt whatever of that; although in
the introduction to the Biographical Edition of
the latter, Charles Dickens the younger wrote :

" Flora is supposed to have been taken for
the lady who sat for Dora in David Copperfield,
as she appeared after the lapse of years and with-
out the halo of romance ; but I confess I have
always found considerable difficulty in believ-
ing thatr Yet in the introduction to David
Copperfleld in the same edition he remarked :
" There is some reference in Mr. Forster's
Life to a * Dora ' who came across Charles
Dickens' path very early in his career — when
he was eighteen, in fact — but as she married
somebody else, and developed into the * Flora '
of Little Dorrit, she could have had in reality
very little to do with Dora Spenlow." There
seems to be some contradiction here. There
can, however, be no doubt that in the relations
of Flora and Clennam Dickens drew on his
later knowledge of Mrs. Winter, just as his
association with Maria Beadnell had given

[ 104]

him much material for David Copper/1 eld. In
the first place, as the succeeding letters will
show, Mrs. Winter followed him up much as
Flora follows Clennam. In the second place,
he said to both Forster and the Duke of Dev-
onshire that Flora was a fact, not merely an
imagination. To the first he wrote on April
seventh, 18^6: "There are some things in
Flora in number seven that seem to me to be
extraordinarily droll, with something serious at
the bottom of them after all. Ah, well ! was
there not something very serious in it once?"

To the second he said in a letter dated July
fifth of the same year : " I am so glad you like
Flora. It came into my head one day that we
have all had our Floras, and that it was a half-
serious, half-ridiculous truth which had never
been told. It is a wonderful gratification to
me to find that everybody knows her. In-
deed, some people seem to think I have done
them a personal injury and that their indi-
vidual Floras (God knows where they are, or
who !) are each and all Little Dorrits."

In the light of this last letter and those to
follow, the following from Little Dorrit reads
as merely a humorously intensified account
of the first meeting of Dickens and Mrs. Win-

[105]

ten It will be seen that Dickens assigned
himself a dual part ; for in the Paris jewellery
store we found him playing Mr. Dorrit, and
here he assumes the role of Clennam. About
the only attempt he has made to disguise the
identity of Mrs. Winter and himself in this
remarkable narrative is that he gives her the
character of Flora Pinching, a tall widow, and
he, as Arthur Clennam, pretends to be an
unmarried man : —

" My daughter Flora," said Mr. Casby, " as you may
have heard probably, Mr. Clennam, was married and
established in life, several years ago. She had the mis-
fortune to lose her husband when she had been married
a few months. She resides with me again. She will
be glad to see you, if you will permit me to let her know
that you are here."

" By all means," returned Clennam. " I should have
preferred the request, if your kindness had not anticipated
me."

Upon this, Mr. Casby rose up in his list shoes, and
with a slow, heavy step (he was of an elephantine build),
made for the door. He had a long wide-skirted bottle-
green coat on, and a bottle-green pair of trowsers, and a
bottle-green waistcoat. The Patriarchs were not dressed
in bottle-green broadcloth, and yet his clothes looked
patriarchal. . . .

Clennam's eyes no sooner fell upon the object of his
old passion, than it shivered and broke to pieces.

[ 106]

Most men will be found sufficiently true to themselves
to be true to an old idea. It is no proof of an inconstant
mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not
bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast
is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam's case. In his
youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped
upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and
imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home,
like Robinson Crusoe's money ; exchangeable with no
one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out
for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he
had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dis-
missed her from any association with his Present or
Future as if she had been dead (which she might
easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept
the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred
place. . . .

Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too,
and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora,
whom he had left a lily, had become a peony ; but that
was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in
all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That
was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless
long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now.
That was a fatal blow.

This is Flora !

" I am sure," giggled Flora, tossing her head with a
caricature of her girlish manner, such as a mummer
might have presented at her own funeral, if she had
lived and died in classical antiquity, " I am ashamed to
see Mr. Clennam, I am a mere fright, I know he'll find

[107]

me fearfully changed, I am actually an old woman, it 's
shocking to be so found out, it 's really shocking ! "

He assured her that she was just what he had expected,
and that time had not stood still with himself.

" Oh ! But with a gentleman it 's so different and
really you look so amazingly well that you have no
right to say anything of the kind, while, as to me you
know — oh ! " cried Flora with a little scream, " I am
dreadful ! . . .

" But if we talk of not having changed," said Flora,
who, whatever she said, never once came to a full stop,
" look at Papa, is not Papa precisely what he was when
you went away, is n't it cruel and unnatural of Papa to
be such a reproach to his own child, if we go on in this
way much longer people who don't know us will begin
to suppose that I am Papa's Mama ! "

That must be a long time hence, Arthur considered.

" Oh Mr. Clennam you insincerest of creatures," said
Flora, " I perceive already you have not lost your old
way of paying compliments, your old way when you
used to pretend to be so sentimentally struck you know
— at least I don't mean that, 1 — oh I don't know what
I mean ! " Here Flora tittered confusedly, and gave him
one of her old glances. . . .

" You must n't think of going yet," said Flora —
Arthur had looked at his hat, being in a ludicrous dis-
may, and not knowing what to do ; " you could never
be so unkind as to think of going, Arthur — I mean Mr.
Arthur — or I suppose Mr. Clennam would be far more
proper — but I am sure I don't know what 1 'm saying —
without a word about the dear old days gone forever,

[108]

however when I come to think of it I dare say it would
be much better not to speak of them and it 's highly
probable that you have some much more agreeable en-
gagement and pray let Me be the last person in the world
to interfere with it though there was a time, but I am
running into nonsense again."

Was it possible, that Flora could have been such a
chatterer, in the days she referred to ? Could there have
been anything like her present disjointed volubility, in
the fascinations that had captivated him ?

" Indeed I have little doubt," said Flora, running on
with astonishing speed, and pointing her conversation
with nothing but commas, and very few of them, " that
you are married to some Chinese lady, being in China so
long and being in business and naturally desirous to settle
and extend your connection nothing was more likely than
that you should propose to a Chinese lady and nothing
was more natural I am sure than that the Chinese lady
should accept you and think herself very well oflf too. 1
only hope she 's not a Pagodian dissenter."

" I am not," returned Arthur, smiling in spite of him-
self, *' married to any lady. Flora."

" Oh good gracious me 1 hope you never kept your-
self a bachelor so long on my account ! " tittered Flora ;
" but of course you never did why should you, pray
don't answer, I don't know where 1 'm running to, oh do
tell me something about the Chinese ladies whether their
eyes are really so long and narrow always putting me in
mind of mother-of-pearl fish at cards and do they really
wear tails down their back and plaited too or is it only
the men, and when they pull their hair so very tight off

[ 109]

their foreheads don't they hurt themselves, and why do
they stick little bells all over their bridges and temples
and hats and things or don't they really do it ! " Flora
gave him another of her old glances. Instantly she went
on again, as if he had spoken in reply for some time.

*' Then it 's all true and they really do ! good gracious
Arthur ! — pray excuse me — old habit — Mr. Clennam
far more proper — what a country to live in for so long
a time, and with so many lanterns and umbrellas too
how very dark and wet the climate ought to be and no
doubt actually is, and the sums of money that must be
made by those two trades where everybody carries them
and hangs them everywhere, the little shoes too and the
feet screwed back in infancy is quite surprising, what a
traveller you are ! " . . .

Flora had at last talked herself out of breath for one
moment. One moment ; for she recovered breath in the
act of raising a minute comer of her pocket-handkerchief
to her eye, as a tribute to the ghost of the departed Mr.
F., and began again.

" No one could dispute, Arthur — Mr. Clennam — that
it's quite right you should be formally friendly to me
under the altered circumstances and indeed you could n't
be anything else, at least I suppose not you ought to
know, but I can't help recalling that there was a time
when things were very different."

" My dear Mrs. Finching," Arthur began, struck by
the good tone again.

" Oh not that nasty ugly name, say Flora ! "

"Flora. I assure you, Flora, I am happy in seeing
you once more, and in finding that, like me, you have

[ 110]

not forgotten the old foolish dreams, when we saw all
before us in the light of our youth and hope."

" You don't seem so," pouted Flora, "you take it very
coolly, but however I know you are disappointed in me,
I suppose the Chinese ladies — Mandarinesses if you call
them so — are the cause or perhaps I am the cause my-
self, it 's just as likely."

" No, no," Clennam entreated, " don't say that."

" Oh I must you know," said Flora, in a positive tone,
" what nonsense not to, I know 1 am not what you ex-
pected, I know that very well."

In the midst of her rapidity, she had found that out
with the quick perception of a cleverer woman. The in-
consistent and profoundly unreasonable way in which she
instantly went on, nevertheless, to interweave their long-
abandoned boy and girl relations with their present inter-
view, made Clennam feel as if he were lightheaded.

The following letter in the series phrases
better than anything else by Dickens the great
restlessness that always came upon him when
a new book was forming in his mind, and that
was intensified between 18^4 and 18^8 by the
increasing harassment he felt in his relations
with Mrs. Dickens. —

Tuesday, third April, 1855.

My dear Maria, — Going down to Ashford this day

week, already with a bad cold, 1 increased it so much by

getting into the intense heat consequent upon a reading

of three hours and then coming up in the night (which I

[111]

was obliged to do, having business in town next morn-
ing) , that I was very unwell all the week, and on Friday
night was so completely knocked up that I came home at
9 o'clock to bed. A necessity is upon me now — as at
most times — of wandering about in my own wild way,
to think. I could no more resist this on Sunday or yes-
terday, than a man can dispense with food, or a horse
can help himself from being driven. I hold my inventive
capacity on the stern condition that it must master my
whole life, often have complete possession of me, make
its own demands upon me, and sometimes for months
together put everything else away from me. If I had not
known long ago that my place could never be held, unless
I were at any moment ready to devote myself to it en-
tirely, I should have dropped out of it very soon. All
this I can hardly expect you to understand — or the rest-
lessness and waywardness of an author's mind. You
have never seen it before you, or lived with it, or had
occasion to think or care about it, and you cannot have
the necessary consideration for it. "It is only half an
hour" — "it is only an afternoon" — "it is only an
evening " — people say to me over and over again — but
they don't know that it is impossible to command one's
self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five
minutes — or that the mere consciousness of an engage-
ment will sometimes worry a whole day. These are the
penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to
an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to
it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you
suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can't help it ;
I must go my way, whether or no.

[112]

I thought you would understand that, in sending the
card for the box, I sent an assurance that there was noth-
ing amiss. I am pleased to find that you were all so
much interested with the play. My ladies say that the
first part is too painful and wants relief. I have been
going to see it a dozen times, but have never seen it yet,
and never may. Madame Ce'leste is injured thereby
(you see how unreasonable people are!) and says in the
Green Room, with a very tight cheek, *' M. Dickens est
artiste ! Mais il n'a jamais vu Janet Pride ! "

It is like a breath of fresh spring air to know that that
unfortunate baby of yours is out of her one close room
and has about half a pint of very doubtful air per day. 1
could only have become her godfather on the condition
that she had 500 gallons of open air at any rate, every
day of her life. And you would soon see a rose or two
in the face of my other little friend, Ella, if you opened
all your doors and windows throughout the whole of
all fine weather, from morning to night.

I am going off, I don't know where or how far, to pon-
der about I don't know what. Sometimes I am half in

1 Reading these words of kindly interest in the child of Maria
Beadnell, one sees from what experience grew such a passage as the
following : —

" No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with
a blameless though an unchanged mind when she was a wife and a
mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him — an
instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities
are touched in such a case, no echoes tell ; but it is so, and it was
so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucy held out
her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew." Tale
of Two Cities.

[113 1

the mood to set oflF for France, sometimes I think 1 will
go and walk about on the sea shore for three of four
months, sometimes I look towards the Pyrenees, some-
times Switzerland. I made a compact with a great Span-
ish authority last week, and vowed I would go to Spain.
Two days afterwards Layard and 1 agreed to go to Con-
stantinople when Parliament rises. To-morrow I shall
probably discuss with somebody else, the idea of going
to Greenland or the North Pole. The end of all this,
most likely, will be that I shall shut myself up in some
out of the way place I have never yet thought of, and
go desperately to work there.

Once upon a time I didn't do such things, you
say. No, but I have done them through a good many
years now, and they have become myself and my
life.

Ever affectionately, C D.

This letter shows even more clearly than its
predecessor the completely changed attitude
of Dickens toward Mrs. Winter. This is the
writing of a man in whom all ardency of feel-
ing for the person addressed is forever dead,
but who yet wishes to remain on terms of
pleasant and even of intimate acquaintance-
ship, provided the intimacy is not exacting.
After the letter of March tenth it is not sur-
prising that Mrs. Winter evidently said she
feared Dickens did not really care to see her.
Maria Beadnell must have changed greatly in

[114]

the years since 1830, — that, as Mrs. Winter,
she was not chilled into indifference and silence
by such sentences as these of the letter: "I am
grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to
see you, but I can't help it ; I must go my way,
whether or no. . . . Once upon a time I didn't
do such things, you say. No, but I have
done them through a good many years now,
and they have become myself and my life."
From '* Remember, 1 accept all with my whole
soul, and reciprocate all," to something not far
from rudeness must signify great disillusion-
ment, dramatic in its suddenness and com-
pleteness. Could time have brought a more
complete, and a more theatrical, turning of the
tables ?

The next letter further strengthens the evi-
dence as to the great change in Dickens toward
his old love. Is there a touch of ironic humor
in that "but one," — inserted as an after-
thought in the first line? Certainly there
would seem to be a hint in the last lines that
other thoughts than of him should be absorb-
ing the mother's mind. — "I shall be very
happy to receive your little token of remem-
brance, when you have less care on your mind,
and have set your baby up — as I hope and

[115]

trust you soon will — twenty times stronger
than before."

Kindly tolerance of an exacting friend who
has been given some ground for her assiduities
by an unwise impetuosity on his part very
early in their renewal of their friendship has
replaced all the stronger feeling. Clearly
enough, Dickens had no longer any hearty
interest in the correspondence, but was un-
willing to break it off lest he should sorely
wound the woman he had once deeply loved
and whom he had welcomed to his friendship
again with unwise enthusiasm. —

Tavistock House,

Eleventh June, I855.

My dear Maria, — I answered your last letter, but
one,^ almost as soon as I received it, to let you know that
I should be out of town that Sunday, and for several
Sundays in succession. This note of mine must have
gone astray somehow or somewhere, for I posted it my-
self. It has happened on a former occasion — but only
on one — that a letter of mine failed to reach its destina-
tion. How this comes to be missing, I cannot compre-
hend.

Your account of your poor little child is distressing
indeed, and makes me heartily sorry for your fatigues
and anxieties. 1 have never had any faith in the homoeo-
pathic system and therefore have never tried it. 1 am
1 In MS., the words " but one " are added above the line.

[ 116]

inclined to think that it is principally successful with
people who have nothing the matter with them, and that
active diseases where there is a vigorous action for evil
going on, require more decided remedies. Still, it is in-
dubitably successful m some violent cases even.

I shall be very happy to receive your little token of
remembrance, when you have less care on your mind,
and have set your baby up — as 1 hope and trust you soon
will — twenty times stronger than before. Take care of
your baby's mother, and God bless her.

Ever faithfully yours, C. D.

The next letter of the set is conspicuous for
its beauty of feeling and of phrase. It is per-
haps noteworthy that even this very sym-
pathetic letter opens with "My dear Mrs.
Winter," the form Dickens henceforth used
always in the correspondence, except in the
last letter of all. It is but another evidence of
the steady if kindly diminishing by Dickens
of the intimacy cordially sought by both at
first. —

Tavistock House,
Wednesday, thirteenth June, t85S.

My dear Mrs. Winter, — I am truly grieved to hear
of your affliction in the loss of your darling baby. But
if you be not, even already, so reconciled to the parting
from that innocent child for a little while, as to bear it
gently and with a softened sorrow, 1 know that that not
unhappy state of mind must soon arise. The death of

[117]

infants is a release from so much chance and change —
from so many casualties and distresses — and is a thing
so beautiful in its serenity and peace — that it should not
be a bitterness, even in a mother's heart. The simplest
and most affecting passage in all the noble history of
our Great Master, is his consideration for little children.
And in reference to yours, as many millions of bereaved
mothers poor and rich will do in reference to theirs until
the end of time, you may take the comfort of the gra-
cious words "And he took a child, and set it in the
midst of them."

In a book by one of the greatest English writers,^
called A Journey from this World to the Next, a parent
comes to the distant country beyond the grave, and finds
the little girl he had lost so long ago, engaged in building
a bower to receive him in, when his aged steps should
bring him there at last. He is filled with joy to see her

— so young — so bright — so full of promise — and is
enraptured to think that she never was old, wan, tearful,
withered. This is always one of the sources of conso-
lation in the deaths of children. With no effort of the
fancy, with nothing to undo, you will always be able to
think of the pretty creature you have lost, as a child in
Heaven.

A poor little baby of mine lies in Highgate Cemetery

— and I laid her, just as you think of laying yours, in
the catacombs there, until I made a resting-place for all
of us in the free air.

It is better that I should not come to see you. I feel
quite sure of that, and will think of you instead.

1 Defoe.
[118]

God bless and comfort you! Mrs Dickens and her
sister send their kindest condolences to yourself and Mr
Winter. I add mine with all my heart.

Affectionately your friend

Charles Dickens

Here there is a break of three years in the
correspondence. Meantime Little Dorrit had
been written (185^-^7), and in Flora Pinching
Dickens had half sadly mocked at his own
sentimentality in thinking for a moment that
the charmer of his youth must inevitably be as
charming for him at middle age. The original
of Dora and Flora must have read her second
presentation with very different feelings. It is
most likely, however, that with the blessed
power we have not to see ourselves as others
see us and to be able to explain our worst va-
garies to ourselves with entire satisfactoriness,
Mrs. Winter never dreamed that Flora owed
anything to her. Certainly, during all this
period she was on terms of intimacy with the
Dickens family, for in July, 18^7, the faithful
sister-in-law of Dickens, Georgina Hogarth,
wrote to her freely of intimate family matters.
Walter Dickens, the fourth child, whom his
father had called "Young Skull" because of
his high cheek-bones, went out to India in

[119]

July, 18^7, as a cadet in the "Company's ser-
vice." He died in the hospital at Calcutta in
1863.—

Gad's Hill, July 21 st, 1857.
My dear Mrs. Winter, — I cannot tell you how much
we all feel your kind recollection of and sympathy with
us in our parting with dear Walter. It has been a sad
trial, but thank God ! it is over, and you will be glad to
hear that the dear boy bore it a very great deal better
than we could have hoped. We, that is to say, his
mother and sisters and 1 parted with him at Tavistock
House on Sunday morning. Charles and Charley went
with him to Southampton. He broke down very near at
the moment of bidding us goodbye, but his father (who
with Charley returned here last night, after seeing him
off) says he soon recovered, and was never so much cut
up again. He was immensely delighted and astonished
with the magnificence and comfort of the fitting up of
the vessel — all his previous experience of steam boats
having been the very uncomfortable Boulogne packets.
They made acquaintance with the Captain whom they
liked extremely, and most lucky of all, he found an old
school-fellow on board, who is going the whole journey
to Calcutta. This, Charles said, seemed to set him up
entirely, and when they left him finally, he looked a great
deal less sad than they did. This is all very cheering, is
it not ? and reconciles us very much to the separation.
Please God that he may keep his health and do well ! I
assure you your suggestions were most valuable. Charles
desires me, with his love to you, to say how much he was
obliged to you for them. Flannel he was well provided

[120 1

with, and his father spoke to him strongly over the im-
perative necessity of his wearing it — but the medicines
he had not got, and we lost no time on Saturday in going
to Savory & Moore's and providing him with a little case
containing plenty of quinine, Jeremy's opium and essence
of ginger which the man recommended to be added. So
you see your letter was of essential service to our young
traveller, as, strange to say, the necessity of giving him
these things had not occurred to his father who generally
thinks of everything.

I am very sorry you have hurt your hand. It is such
a miserable thing to be disabled in that way, especially
with the right hand.

Our plays ^ have been a tremendous success, and I am
happy to say the Fund is going on increasing in a most
satisfactory manner. We have one more performance of
" The Frozen Deep " Saturday. I am very glad you
were pleased the night you were there. It was all per-
fectly right about the money.

The Queen and her party * made a most excellent audi-
ence— so far from being cold, as we expected, they cried
and laughed and applauded and made as much demon-
stration as so small a party (they were not more than
fifty) could do. She sent, through Colonel Phipps, an
expression of her immense delight at the whole affair.
But she did not come for the Jerrold Fund. That was

1 For the Douglas Jerrold Fund. " An amateur company, in-
cluding many of Mr. Jerrold' s colleagues on ' Punch ' gave subscrip-
tion performances of ' The Frozen Deep ' [Jerrold's play] at the Gal-
lery of Illustration, Regent St," ''Letters'' p. 4l6.

" In July a performance of " The Frozen Deep " was given at her
request before the Queen and the Prince Consort.

[121]

distinctly understood beforehand. Wlien the application
was made to her to attend the performance for the Fund
on the nth July, she sent Col. Phipps to Charles to ex-
plain how sorry she was that she could not break through
an unwritten rule not to patronize anything of the kind
for the benefit of Individuals, as she might be called
upon to do so every day, which one can easily understand.
But, at the same time, she begged Col. Phipps to say
how much she had always wished to see the play of
which she had heard a great deal, and to ask Charles if
be would bring it to Buckingham Palace, choose what
room he liked there, and do it as he pleased. To which
Charles replied that he was very anxious to oblige the
Queen, but as neither he nor any of his fellow actors nor
his family went to Court he would rather not go there,
and especially would rather not take his ladies there, in
the quality of actors and actresses, but that, if the Queen
would come to a private representation at the Gallery, to
which she should invite her own party, he would be very
happy to get it up for her alone. The Queen sent back
a most amiable message, to say that she quite felt the
propriety of Charles' objection to go to the Palace, accept-
ing his proposal and fixing the evening for coming to the
Gallery. This is the exact real story which has given
rise to the absurd paragraph in the newspapers.

I am so very sorry to hear your dear little girl missed
her prize. It must have been a great disappointment to
her. It is a great disadvantage to a clever little girl to
be put into a class with much older ones — and it often
happens.

We have all our school boys at home now, enjoying

[122]

their holidays immensely. Dear Walter's last week was
very happy, for they were all together, and they had
young friends down, and had cricket matches in the field,
and of course everybody did their utmost to make much
of him and keep up his spirits and he enjoyed himself
extremely. The play, too, at the last, was a good thing
for us all, for it was an excitement and distraction and
kept us from dwelling on the one subject.

I hope your sister's invalids are all better.

Goodbye, dearest Mrs. Winter, with love from all,

believe me

Affectionately yours,

Georgina Hogarth

Apparently Mrs. Winter, just like Flora,
clung to the idea of an intimate friendship
even when, as we have seen, she was repeatedly
checked by courteous but somewhat formal
letters. At any rate, some communication of
hers brought forth the following kindly but
brief and firm refusal to have busy time cut into
by a useless interview. The Anne referred to,
the author of the verses printed at the end of
this volume, was probably Anne Beadnell Kolle,
who had died in May, 183 6. —

Gad's Hill Place,

HiGHAM BY Rochester, Kent,

Monday, Sixteenth August, 1858.

My dear Mrs. Winter, — I have read poor dear

Anne's prayer with great sorrow, and with many

[123 1

emotions of sadly affectionate remembrance. It was
written, no doubt, under a presentiment of Death ; but
it must always be remembered that such a presentiment
often exists when it fails to be fulfilled ; and it is very
commonly engendered in the state of mind belonging
to the condition in which she composed the prayer.

It would give me great pleasure to see you at Liver-
pool, if 1 had the least confidence in my own freedom
for a moment under the circumstances which will take
me there. But I have so much business to transact at
times, and have to keep myself so quiet at other times,
and have so many people to give directions to, and make
arrangements with (four travel with me) , that 1 see no
one while I am on this Tour, and have to be always
grimly self-denying and heroic. So I shall hope to see
you in London, at some time when I am in a less vir-
tuous, and less hurried and worried condition.

With my love to Ella, and kindest regard to W Winter,
Ever affectionately yours,

Charles Dickens

About three months later a great blow came
to Mrs. Winter in the financial failure of her
husband. She apparently asked Dickens to
aid him to a fresh start in life. Like all the
later letters of the series, however, this, though
kind in tone, is firm in its refusal to be drawn
into any entangling alliances or responsibilities.
A few years later Mr. Winter entered the min-
istry, becoming a curate at Little Eversham,

1 124 ]

Cambridge, in 1866. He was afterwards
Vicar of Alnmouth, Northumberland, where
he died, March 22, 1871.—

Brighton,
Saturday, Thirteenth November, I858.

My dear Mrs. Winter, — I have been so constantly
and rapidly changing from place to place during the past
week, that I am only just now in receipt of the intelli-
gence of your misfortune. With the utmost sincerity
and earnestness of which my heart is capable, I condole
with you upon it, and assure you of my true sympathy
and friendship. It has distressed me greatly. Not be-
cause I am so worldly or so unjust as to couple the least
reproach or blame with a reverse that I do not doubt to
have been unavoidable, and that 1 know to be always
easily possible of occurrence to the best and most fortu-
nate of men, but because I know you feel it heavily.

I wish to Heaven it were in my power to help M'
Winter to any new opening in life. But you can hardly
imagine how powerless 1 am in any such case. My own
work in life being of that kind that 1 must always do it
with my own unassisted hand and head, 1 have such rare
opportunities of placing any one, that for years and years
I have been seeking in vain to help in this way a friend
of the old days when the old house stood unchanged in
Lombard Street. To this hour, 1 have not succeeded,
though 1 have strenuously tried my hardest, both abroad
and at home. Commercial opportunities, above all, are
so far removed from me, that I dare not encourage a
hope of my power to serve M' Winter with my good

[ 125 ]

word, ever coming within a year's journey of my will
and wish to do it.

But I really think that your father, who could do much
in such a case without drawing at all heavily upon his
purse,^ might be induced to do, what — I may say to you,
Maria — it is no great stretch of sentiment to call his
duty. Has not Margaret '^ great influence with him.?
Have not you some ? And don't you think that if you
were to set yourself steadily to exert whatever influence
you can bring to bear upon him, you would do the best
within your reach for your husband, your child, and
yourself.' Is it not all important that you should try
your utmost with him, at this time ?

Forgive my recommending this, if you have so antici-
pated the recommendation as to have done all that pos-
sibly can be done to move him. But what you tell me
about George seems so strange, so hard, and so" ill bal-
anced, that I cannot avoid the subject.

I write in the greatest haste, being overwhelmed by
business here. On Monday I hope to be at Gad's Hill,
and to remain either there or at Tavistock House for
months to come. I enclose a few lines to M' Winter,'
and am ever,

Your faithful friend,

Charles Dickens

* Mr. Beadnell left a property of some £40,000.
^ Mrs. David Lloyd, the eldest sister.

» Brighton,
Saturday, Thirteenth November, 1858.

My dear Mr. Winter,— In the hope that a friendly word of
remembrance in season may not be unacceptable to you, I write to
assure you of my sympathy with you in your trouble. Pray do not

[126]

Again there is a gap in the correspondence
till the 17th of November, 1862. Twelve days
before, George Beadnell had died at the age
of eighty-nine. How different the treatment
of the past in this last letter as compared with
his sentimental reflections in the first three of
this second series ! Here the mood is grave,
moved, but unsentimental, and noticeably de-
tached, instead of being almost passionately
personal. The erstwhile beautiful " visions of
his youth" are now reflected upon his memory
in the form of hideous ghosts. —

Paris, Rue du Faubourg S"^ Honors , 27

Monday, Seventeenth November, 1862.

My dear Maria, — I had read in Galignani that your
poor father was dead, before I received your touching ac-
count of his last moments. Of course I could not be

let it cast you down too much; what has happened to you, has
happened to many thousands of good and honorable men, and will
happen again in a like manner, to the end of all things. If you should
feel the bitterness of losing belief in any nature you had previously
trusted in, consider that the truth is always better than falsehood,
even though the truth involves the detection of such slcin-deep friend-
ships as that which can cool towards a man in temporary misfortune.
It is better lost than kept, as all things worthless are.

Be strong of heart for yourself, and look forward to a better time.
You will not think, I know, that I obtrude myself upon you in asking
to be borne in mind among the friends who feel truly towards you.

Faithfully yours always,

Charles Dickens

[127]

surprised, knowing his great age, by the wearing out of
his vitality ; but — almost equally of course — it was a
shock too, for all the old Past comes out of its grave
when I think of him, and the Ghosts of a good many
years stand about his memory.

He died among his children, and could have died with
no better words and no better hopes. God be thanked for
it, and may such mercy and comfort be in store for us !

Always yours affectionately

Charles Dickens

Pray give my kind regard to Margaret and your
brother.

What a perfect contrast, when we place the
two sets of letters side by sidel The very
anti-climax of the last of the second set is
significant. Can the importance of the two
sets for an understanding of the experiences
which underlay parts of David Copperfield
and Little Dorrit be gainsaid ? Maria Beadnell,
the young girl, and Mrs. Winter, the mature
woman, gave Dickens his Dora and Flora. As
he says again and again, Maria Beadnell's in-
fluence was at one time the strongest in his
life, and remained effective in his character for
many years. Her group of friends, of whom
we first hear in these MSS., gave him sugges-
tions or the originals for some of the notable
figures in his earlier works.

[128]

The letters readjust and correct some previ-
ous misapprehensions as to the relations of his
work to his life, and justify Forster, as con-
trasted with Charles Dickens the younger, who
persistently attempted in the introductions to
the Macmillan edition to minimize the autobio-
graphical and the personal in his father's novels.

Above all, these letters reveal the man in his
youth, and later the youth in the man, — im-
petuous always, but as the years passed, too
trained of eye, too skilled in humanity, not to
see at once, when he and Mrs. Winter faced
each other, the real proportions of a situation
into which he had dashed at the call of his
naturally sentimental imagination. And when
finally he saw the real proportions, he did not
wholly draw back, leaving only bitterness and
pain to the woman whose unwise but easily
comprehensible coquetry with an old atfection
was painful to him, but so managed the deli-
cate situation as to remain her friend and to
give her in his family a position of affectionate
regard with those he loved and honored most.

Surely Dickens loses nothing from these
letters, particularly the second set. Both sets
are as human as the man always was, and in
the end they are chivalrous and, as a whole,

[129]

tactful. Reading them, one cannot respect
Dickens less; rather one knows him better,
seeing the kindliness and the deep regard he
had for friendship, even when past, and how
patient he was willing to be for its sake.

There remain in the collection of letters
placed in the hands of the editor two which
for the reason just mentioned, namely, that
their final effect is to right some misunder-
standing of Dickens, it seems advisable to print.
One is from his sister-in-law. Miss Georgina
Hogarth to Mrs. Winter; the other is from
Charles Dickens the younger to his mother.
Both concern that very painful episode, the
separation of Dickens and his wife in the
latter part of May, 18^8. At the time there
was, of course, much petty gossip, some of it
hostile to Dickens, some of it most unkind
and unjust to Mrs. Dickens.

There has been in the many years since
some censure of Dickens, ranging from in-
nuendoes, particularly exasperating because of
their vagueness, to severe blame for his alleged
selfishness as the cause of the separation. As
might be expected, the responsibility must be
laid to some extent on the shoulders of both
husband and wife. Clearly, in the light of

[130]

these two letters it cannot be accounted for as
simply, if alluringly, as that brilliant lover of
the paradoxical, Mr. Chesterton, would have
us believe. He has said : " Dickens had a bad
quality not intrinsically very terrible, which
he allowed to wreck his life. He also had
a small weakness that could sometimes be
stronger than all his strengths. His selfishness
was not, it need hardly be said, the selfishness
of Gradgrind ; he was particularly compassion-
ate and liberal. Nor was it in the least the
selfishness of Skimpole. He was entirely self-
dependent, industrious, and dignified. His self-
ishness was wholly a selfishness of the nerves.
Whatever his whim or the temperature of
the instant told him to do, must be done.
He was the type of man who would break a
window if it would not open and give him air.
And this weakness of his had, by the time of
which we speak, led to a breach between him-
self and his wife which he was too exasper-
ated and excited to heal in time. If London
bored him, he must go to the Continent at
once; if the Continent bored him, he must
back to London at once. If the day was too
noisy, the whole household must be quiet ; if
night was too quiet, the whole household must

[131]

wake up. Above all, he had this supreme
character of the domestic despot — that his
good temper was, if possible, more despotic
than his bad temper. When he was miserable
(as he often was, poor fellow !), they only had
to listen to his railings. When he was happy,
they had to listen to his novels. All this,
which was mainly mere excitability, did not
seem to amount to much; it did not in the
least mean that he had ceased to be a clean-
living and kind-hearted and quite honest man.
But there was this evil about it — that he did
not resist his little weakness at all; he pam-
pered it as Skimpole pampered his. A mere
silly trick of temperament did everything that
the blackest misconduct could have done. A
random sensibility, started about the shuffling
of papers or the shutting of a window,
ended by tearing two clean. Christian people
from each other, like a blast of bigamy or
adultery."^

The trouble with this clever passage is its
avoidance of the fact that one of the chief
sources of fallacy in the logic of human conduct
lies in multiplicity of causes. Of course, the
irritability, the hypersensitiveness of Dickens

^ Charles Dickens, G. H. Chesterton, pp. 209--210.
[132]

played its part in preparing for the catastrophe,
but it was not the only cause.

But first to recall the separation : " Thence-
forward [after the end of May, 18^8] he and
his wife lived apart. The eldest son went with
his mother, Dickens at once giving effect to
her expressed wish in this respect, and the
other children remained with himself, their
intercourse with Mrs. Dickens being left en-
tirely to themselves. [We shall see that this
last statement requires a slight modification.]
It was thus far an arrangement of a strictly
private nature, and no decent person could
have had excuse for regarding it in any other
light, if public attention had not been unex-
pectedly invited to it by a printed statement
in Household PVords. Dickens was stung
into this by some miserable gossip at which
in ordinary circumstances no man would have
been more determinedly silent; but he had
now publicly to show himself, at stated times,
as a public entertainer, and this, with his
name even so aspersed, he found to be impos-
sible. All he would concede to my strenuous
resistance against such a publication was an
offer to suppress it, if, upon reference to the
opinion of a certain distinguished man (still

[ 133 1

livings), that opinion should prove to be in
agreement with mine. Unhappily it fell in
with his own, and the publication went on."^
To understand the mood which could make
possible such an address as the following by
an individual to the great public concerning
his most intimate personal affairs, one must
recall that for years Dickens had every right
which constant adulation from the people of
Great Britain and America could give to feel
that whatever touched his life was of the
keenest interest to them. The pronuncia-
mento makes sad reading at this distant day,
but here it is, as it appeared in Household
M^ords, June 12, 18^8: —

Three -and -twenty years have passed since I entered on
my present relations with the Public. They began when
I was so young, that 1 find them to have existed for
nearly a quarter of a century.

Through all that time I have tried to be as faithful to
the Public, as they have been to me. It was my duty
never to trifle with them, or deceive them, or presume
upon their favor, or do any thing with it but work hard
to justify it. I have always endeavoured to discharge
that duty.

My conspicuous position has often made me the sub-
ject of fabulous stories and unaccountable statements.

1 Forster's Life of Charles Dickens.

[134]

Occasionally, such things have chafed me, or even
wounded me ; but, I have always accepted them as the
shadows inseparable from the light of my notoriety and
success. I have never obtruded any such personal uneasi-
ness of mine, upon the generous aggregate of my audience.

For the first time in my life, and I believe for the last,
I now deviate from the principle 1 have so long observed,
by presenting myself in my own Journal in my own
private character, and entreating all my brethren (as
they deem that they have reason to think well of me,
and to know that I am a man who has ever been unaf-
fectedly true to our common calling) , to lend their aid
to the dissemination of my present words.

Some domestic trouble of mine, of long standing, on
which I will make no further remark than that it claims
to be respected, as being of a sacredly private nature, has
lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no
anger or ill-will of any kind, and the whole origin, prog-
ress, and surrounding circumstances of which have been,
throughout, within the knowledge of my children. It is
amicably composed, and its details have now but to be
forgotten by those concerned in it.

By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of
folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all
three, this trouble has been made the occasion of mis-
representations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and
most cruel — involving, not only me, but innocent persons
dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have
no knowledge, if, indeed, they have any existence — and
so widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in a thousand
will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the

[135]

breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an
unwholesome air.

Those who know me and my nature, need no assur-
ance under my hand that such calumnies are as irrecon-
cilable with me, as they are, in their frantic incoherence,
with one another. But, there is a great multitude who
know me through my writings, and who do not know
me otherwise ; and 1 cannot bear that one of them should
be left in doubt, or hazard of doubt, through my poorly
shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now
resort, of circulating the Truth.

I most solemnly declare, then — and this I do, both in
my own name and in my wife's name — that all the
lately whispered rumours touching the trouble at which
I have glanced, are abominably false. And that who-
soever repeats one of them after this denial, will lie
as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false
witness to lie, before Heaven and earth.

For some time previous to the parting it
had been apparent to his friends that a special
spirit of unrest had entered into his life. It
showed itself in the boisterous mirth of his
home circle, the reckless gaiety of his trips
with Stansfield, Collins, and his other friends to
Paris ; the wanderings to and fro on his read-
ing engagements and of private theatricals in
various parts of the country. The naturally
restless energy of his character had received
an intense if morbid stimulus from the rest-

[136]

lessness of his mind. He phrased his restless-
ness in a letter, of July 22, 18^7, to Miss
Mary Boyle: " This is one of what I call my
wandering days before I fall to work. I seem
to be always looking at such times for some-
thing I have not found in life, but may possi-
bly come to a few thousand years hence, in
some other part of some other system. God
knows 1 " It appeared, too, as has already
been pointed out in a number of his letters
from 18^6 to 1858 to Forster. For instance,
— " Why is it, that as with poor David, a sense
comes always crushing on me now, when I
fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have
missed in life, and one friend and companion
I have never made. . . . The old days — the
old daysl Shall I ever, I wonder, get the
frame of mind back as it used to be then ?
... I fmd that the skeleton in my domestic
closet is becoming a pretty big one."^

The following extract from an unpublished
letter of Dickens to Mr. W. H. Wills, the
manager of Household IVords, dated Paris,
April 27, 18^8, well shows the intensely irri-
tated condition of Dickens which preceded
the separation: —

1 Life, Forster, vol. iii. pp. 184-185.

[137]

"My arrangements are these — the tent is
striking here, and I can't work in the midst
of the unsettled domesticity. The Hogarth
family don't leave Tavistock House till next
Saturday, and I cannot in the meantime bear
the contemplation of their imbecility any
more (I think my constitution is already un-
dermined). The sight of Hogarth at break-
fast ! I am therefore going to leave here by
the mail next Tuesday morning for Dover,
where I shall stay at the Ship (working I hope
in the mornings), tic."

Clearly enough, the saddest of all causes,
because the most irreconcilable, incompati-
bility of temperament lay back of all this.
Steadily it sapped away all the foundations
of an affection originally very strong. In the
light of the letters to follow, it is evident that
Dickens' own statement of the case was more
correct than it has been held to be, — is, indeed,
entirely just. He thus wrote to Forster : —

"Poor Catherine and I are not made for
each other, and there is no help for it. It is
not only that she makes me uneasy and un-
happy, but that I make her so too — and much
more so. She is exactly what you know, in
the way of being amiable and complying ; but

[138]

we are strangely ill-assorted for the bond there
is between us. God knows she would have
been a thousand times happier if she had
married another kind of man, and that her
avoidance of this destiny would have been at
least equally good for us both. I am often
cut to the heart by thinking what a pity it is,
for her own sake, that I ever fell in her way;
and if I were sick or disabled tomorrow, I
know how sorry she would be, and how
deeply grieved myself, to think how we had
lost each other. But exactly the same incom-
patibility would arise, the moment I was well
again ; and nothing on earth could make her
understand me, or suit us to each other. Her
temperament will not go with mine. It mat-
tered not so much when we had only our-
selves to consider, but reasons have been
growing since which make it all but hope-
less that we should even try to struggle on.
What is now befalling me I have seen steadily
coming, ever since the days you remember
when Mary was born ; and I know too well
that you cannot, and no one can, help me."
Again he wrote to Forster : " You are not so
tolerant as perhaps you might be of the way-
ward and unsettled feeling which is part (I

[139]

suppose) of the tenure on which one holds
an imaginative life ; and which 1 have, as you
ought to know well, often only kept down by
riding over it like a dragoon — but let that go
by. ... I claim no immunity from blame.
There is plenty of fault on my side, I dare
say, in the way of a thousand uncertainties,
caprices, and difficulties of disposition; but
only one thing will alter all that, and that is,
the end which alters everything." *

This letter of Miss Hogarth, written with-
out the remotest thought of publication, and
an extremely intimate letter of the younger
Charles Dickens to his mother, sufficiently
prove the truth of this analysis by Dickens of
the unhappy situation. The originals of both
letters are in Mr. Bixby's possession. Miss
Hogarth wrote thus, just at the end of the
very trying month which had ended with the
separation : —

Tavistock House, May 31st, 1858.

My dearest Maria, — There will be no mistake
about your tickets this time.'' Charles has charged M'
Arthur Smith with full particulars and he will forward
them to you, in due course.

1 Life, Forster, vol. iii. pp. 186-188.

2 For one of the famous " Readings." Mr. Arthur Smith was
the manager for these lectures.

[ 140 ]

I am now going to tell you something which will, I am
sure, surprise you, and, at the first, shock and distress
you. It is that Charles and his wife have agreed to live
apart, in future. Believe me when 1 assure you that 1 am
perfectly convimed that this plan will be for the happiness
of all. I worked hard to prevent it, as long as I saw any
possibility, but latterly 1 have come to the conviction that
there was no other way out of the domestic Misery of
this house. For my sister and Charles have lived un-
happily for years — they were totally unsuited to each
other in almost every respect — and as the children grew
up this unsuitability developed itself more strongly, and
disagreements and Miseries which used to be easily kept
out of sight have forced themselves into notice.

Unhappily, also, by some constitutional misfortune and
incapacity, my sister always, from their infancy, threw
her children upon other people, consequently as they
grew up, there was not the usual strong tie between them
and her — in short for many years, although we have put
a good face upon it, we have been very miserable at home.
My sister has often expressed a desire to go and live
away, but Charles never agreed to it on the girls' account ;
but latterly he thought it must be to their advantage as
well as to his own and Catherine's, to consent to this and
remodel their unhappy home. So, by mutual consent
and for the reasons I have told you, and no other, they
have come to this arrangement. She is to have a house
of her own in London, and her eldest son (at his father's
request and not taking any part or showing any prefer-
ence in doing it) is to live with and take care of her.
The other children remain with their father — his eldest

[ 141]

daughter naturally taking her mother's place, as mis-
tress of the house. She and Katy and I will divide the
work amongst us, but all the dignity will be Mary's, and
she will do the honours modestly, gracefully and prettily,
1 know.

Of course, Charles is too public a man to take such
a step as this without exciting a more than usual nine
days' wonder — and we have heard of the most wonder-
ful rumours and wicked slanders which have been flying
about the town as to the cause of this separation. To a
few of our real friends Charles wishes the truth to be
stated, and they cannot show their friendship better than
by quietly silencing with the real solemn truth any foolish
or wicked person who may repeat such lies and slanders.

Charles sends you his best love and to dear Ella his
birthday congratulations. You can understand how
much he has been harassed and occupied with all this
business and his readings besides, and that he has very
little time to write letters just now.

Give my particular love to Ella on Wednesday and
wish her many happy returns of the day, and with our
united kind regards to M' Winter, believe me,

My dearest Maria,
Affectionately yours always,

Georgina Hogarth

How filled with dramatic contrasts were the
relations of Maria Beadnell and Dickens 1 Not
only did the youth who had felt himself
scorned and mortified come, twenty years
later, to hold just the attitude of tolerant,

[ 142 ]

kindly indifference which in Maria Beadnell
had maddened him at times, but she at forty
odd, when ready to revive the old sentimental
relationship, found herself taken into the family
confidence concerning a separation from the
woman who had in Dickens' youth replaced
her.

That the sympathy of the children was with
Dickens is shown by the arrangements made
and by this letter written by the eldest son,
some six weeks after the preceding : —

BiSHOPSGATE Street Within,^
13 July, 1858.

My dear Mother, — Although I much regret being
the medium of the communication I have to make to
you, still, as 1 know it is part of the duty I have set be-
fore myself 1 accept it without hesitation. It is this : —

On arriving this morning from Henley I found await-
ing me a letter from my father referring to your letter to
Frank. He says : " I myself took out of our Deed of
Separation the usual formal clause inserted by her own
solicitors, that she should have access to the children ex-
cept at Tavistock House. That exception seemed to me
to convey an unnecessary slight upon her, and 1 said that
she should see them there or anywhere." You see there-
fore that you have a distinct right to see the children
when, where, or how you please, but he places these re-

1 This letter is printed from the original, which is in Mr. Bixby's
collection.

[143 1

strictions on their visits, which I am particularly desirous
to impress upon you {from myself, and not from him),
he has the most perfect right and power to do :

" I positively forbid the children ever to utter one word
to their grandmother or to Helen Hogarth. If they are ever
brought into the presence of either of these two, 1 charge
them immediately to leave your mother's house and
come back to me." — And further in reference to Mr.
Lemon, " I positively forbid the children ever to see him
or to speak to him, and for the same reason I absolutely
prohibit them ever being taken to Mr. Evans' house." ^

You will see that as far as you are concerned he has no
desire, and, in fact no power, if he had the wish, to keep
them from you ; but he has, as their father, an absolute
right to prevent their going into any society which may
be distasteful to him, as long as they remain under age.
I think it necessary to point this out to you strongly, in
order that there may be no unnecessary and useless talk
on this matter. And here, I trust, the subject will rest
between us.

I shall sleep at Queen's Road to-night as I have a
good deal to pack up there. I will be home to dinner
tomorrow at six and will then permanently take up my
quarters with you. Till then I remain, ever, your most
affectionate son, Charley

Surely one cannot censure the details of the
settlement itself. Rather, it is the lack of pro-

» The coupling of Mr. Lemon's name with that of Mr. Evans
would suggest that the cause of offence of this old friend was
similar, — an inability to agree with all the measures of Dickens
at this time, especially his pronunciamento to the public.

[ 144]

portion, the willingness to rush into print,
which one regrets. All that Dickens saw
wrongly at the moment were his cherished re-
lations with the public which had lionized him
so long. Bewildered by the insistent fear that
they would do him what he felt to be grave
injustice, he lost all sense of real values. He
even wanted Tuncb, of all papers, to print the
pronunciamento which he had given in House-
bold PVords. When his old publishers and
friends, Bradbury and Evans, refused very
properly, he broke with them for good, writing
thus to Mr. Evans, in the white heat of his
anger : —

Dear Sir, — I have had stern occasion to impress
upon my children that their father's name is their best
possession, and that it would indeed be trifled with and
wasted by him if either through himself or through them
he held any terms with those who had been false to it in
the very greatest need and under the very greatest wrong
it has ever known. You know very well why (with
hard distress of mind and bitter disappointment) I have
been forced to include you in this class. I have no
more to say.

Charles Dickens

It would, however, be most unjust to leave
as the result of this examination of the letters

[145]

the idea that Dickens was probably as little to
blame for the complicated marital relations as
he was in the tinal settlement. Had the lot of
Mrs. Dickens been easy? Dickens himself
admitted : " There is plenty of fault on my
side, I dare say." Evidently he did not recall
the exact incidents, but was willing to grant
this much. There lay the trouble : much that
must have been most trying in him was done
or said without the slightest thought of its
eifect on those around him. Mrs. Dickens mar-
ried a rising young author when he was but
twenty-four. " A very young man fighting
his way, and excessively poor, with no memo-
ries for years that were not monotonous and
mean, and with his strongest and most per-
sonal memories quite ignominious and unen-
durable, was suddenly thrown into the society
of a whole family of girls [the Hogarth sisters].
I think it does not overstate his weakness and
I think it partly constitutes his excuse, to say
that he fell in love with all of them. As
sometimes happens in the undeveloped youth,
an abstract femininity simply intoxicated him.
And again, I think we shall not be mistakenly
accused of harshness if we put the point in
this way; that by a kind of accident he got

[ 146]

hold of the wrong sister."* That statement
of Mr. Chesterton needs modification, because
he did not know of the love affair with Maria
Beadnell ; but the idea is fundamentally right.
Just because of a rebuff in his recent experi-
ence, Dickens basked in the affection shown
him by the Hogarth sisters, expanding grate-
fully in its warmth. He made his choice only
to fmd, as has many another man who chose
when young, that he had missed in a family
the one who might have been the perfect
helpmate of whom he dreamed.

But would this other have been the perfect
helpmate? Very likely not; for Dickens, in his
highly wrought sensitiveness, must at times
have been, as Mrs. Carlyle said of her soul-
wearying husband, " gey ill to live wi'."
Moreover, it is one thing to be the wife, quite
another the sympathizing friend, close, but
neither so close as the wife, nor yet exempted
from the many little courtesies which many a
man expects his wife to do without. Imme-
diately after the marriage and till her premature
death in 1837, Mary Hogarth was constantly
with the young wife. Of course Mrs. Dickens
loved her sister, but would any affectionate

1 Charles Dickens, G. H. Chesterton, pp. 66-67.
[147]

woman wholly enjoy hearing her husband
talk freely of a love for her deceased sister so
profound that he wished to be buried in the
same grave with her? Surely such talk before
the mother of his increasing family, and in
the presence of others than those belonging
to the immediate family circle, was scarcely
tactful. And in 1842 Georgina Hogarth, com-
petent, wise, controlled, alert for every need of
Dickens, came into the household. As the
years passed, Mrs. Dickens saw nearly all the
duties and affections dearest to a woman as
wife pass to Miss Hogarth. Admit that her
own inertia or inability made all this neces-
sary, — what we are responsible for cuts none
the less deep. Nor is it a balm to the wounded
spirit to know that we have no real ground
for complaint. Dickens needed a wife who
could at all times command his admiration;
whose superiority to himself in household
matters as well as matters of the spirit he
could not but admit. Neither of these did
Mrs. Dickens provide ; hence the tragedy.

These last two letters make clear the truth
of the analysis by Dickens of the situation
published long ago by Forster. They should
set at rest all hints and stories going to show

[148]

that this was more than a domestic tragedy
resulting from incompatibility of temper. For
this purpose, and this alone, the two letters
are printed here.

Surely all the letters in this volume, but more
particularly the last two, show that in all the
puzzle of life, even to a great novelist when he
must live it rather than write of it, Dickens
did his best to be the man he could be in his
best moods. Whatever his petulance at times,
whatever his sensitiveness to public opinion,
so great that even in his will he could insist
that the amount he had allowed Mrs. Dickens
for her support since the separation should be
known, yet at all the crises of his experiences,
as these letters show more than once, he re-
vealed the finer and sounder humanity that
was in him. From each crisis he comes forth,
on the whole, as fundamentally right in feeling
and as steadily striving toward his ideals.

George P. Baker.

[149]

FAREWELL BEQUESTS
[Anne's Prayer, referred to on page 123.]

Ere the last fleeting ties of life are broken
While those I love around me weeping stand.
Let me dispense to each some parting token
Of one fast hastening to the spirit-land.
Language & gifts but feebly can impart
The deep affection of my ardent heart,
Yet, dearest friends, these last memorials take,
And prize them for my sake.

Father — thy high & stainless reputation
By the pure diamond well may imaged be,
Accept this ring — see how its radiation
Casts round its neighbourhood a brilliancy.
Within thy home I thus have honoured dwelt.
And when the world has praised me, I have felt
That in its homage I should not partake,
Save for my father's sake.

Mother — this locket thou wilt fondly cherish.
Not for its outward shrine of gold & pearls.
It guards a part of me that need not perish, —
One of my lavish store of auburn curls.
Methinks I could not to thy share assign
Aught that appeared so fully, truly mine —
This relic of thy grateful daughter take
And wear it for her sake.
[150]

Sister, — receive this lute, its sprightly numbers
Once gaily sounded by our joyous hearth,
But when thou see'st me laid in death's cold slumbers,
Touch it no more to songs of festal mirth.
Sing of the meetings of fond friends above.
Sing of God's wondrous grace & pardoning love ;
These holy strains at peaceful evening wake,
For thy poor sister's sake.

Brother — my little brother — thou hast tended
Often with me my greenhouse plants & flow'rs ;
Take their sole charge — they safely are defended
By fostering walls from sudden blights & showers.
Thus is thy childhood in its tender bloom.
Trained with fond care, & kept from storm and gloom ;
Dear child, improvement daily strive to make
For thy kind parent's sake.

I seek in vain one absent, erring brother,
Alas ! he wanders on a foreign sod.
Yet when thou next shalt see him, give him, mother,
This sacred volume — 't is the word of God.
Tell him his sister asked in constant prayer,
That he in its blest promises might share.
Bid him from sin's delusive trance awake,
For his soul's precious sake.

Lov'd ones — why gaze upon these gifts with sadness ?
My worldly wants & wishes are at rest.
Dost thou not know 1 go in trusting gladness
To take possession of a vast bequest .?

[151]

That heritage was by my Saviour given,
When he descended from his throne in heaven,
Sorrow & suffering on himself to take,
For man's poor sinful sake.

Not mine alone those treasures of salvation ;
The precious boon extends, dear friends, to thee,
Then mourn not for our transient separation ;
But when I leave thee, think & speak of me
As of a freed one mounting to the skies,
Called from a world of snares & vanities,
Her place amid the blessed Saints to take,
For her Redeemer's sake.

[152]

MR. AND MRS. :CHARLES DICKENS

Photographic reproduction of original (unpub-
lished) sketches made by Pierre Morand, an Ameri-
can, who sailed on the Britania with Mr. and Mrs.
Dickens upon the occasion of their visit to America
in January, 1842. The originals are in the collection
of Mr. \A/. K. Bixby.

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-iiamA ns .bnsioM snat*? yd absm aario:- r!

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CHARl-ES DICKENS

Facsimile reproduction of an original (unpub-
lished sketch by Pierre Morand, — in the collection of
Mr. W. K. Bixby.

" This bust profile sketch was taken and nearly
half finished on Sunday afternoon, 23rd January,
1842, while the original was standing at a window
looking into the street. It being on a larger scale
than the others, the likeness is greatly more perfect,
and when I showed it to Mr. Dickens next morning,
he was exceedingly pleased with it, though he pro-
nounced it somewhat flattering. I do not remember
any likeness of him published before the perfection
of photography that expresses his character as faith-
fully as this."- Pierre Morand.

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lo noiio^lloo sdl ni — .bneioM anai*? yd rioJsda bariail

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iddrndmaT Jon ob I .gnhaJjBft Jeriwamoa ii baonuon
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The following invitation in rhyme, written
by Charles Dickens, is addressed to Mark
Lemon, the editor of Punch. It is signed by
Charles Dickens as "T. Sparkler" (his signa-
ture as such is said to be unique), and by his
wife and the two daughters, Mary and Katie.
Mrs. Dickens' sister. Miss Georgina Hogarth,
who is still living, was a member of the house-
hold at the time, and signed the invitation.
About the time of separating from his wife,
Dickens had a falling out with Mark Lemon
and positively forbade the children "ever to
see him or to speak to him," as will be seen
by the letter printed on page 144. ^

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PRINTED BY

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASS, U.S.A.

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW

AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS

WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN
THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH
DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY
OVERDUE.

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U.C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

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Full text of "Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell; private correspondence"

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